The Pritcher Mass

Gordon R. Dickson

OutOf My

Life And Thought

"Late on the third day, at the very moment when, at sunset, we were making our way through a herd of hippopotamuses, there flashed upon my mind, unforeseen and unsought, the phrase, Reverence for Life.'

.. , Now I had found my way to the idea in which affirmation of the world and ethics are contained side by side; now I knew that the ethical acceptance of the world and of life, together with the ideals of civilization contained in this concept, has a foundation in thought . ." byAlbert Schweitzer

I

Chaz Santhad evoked the familiar passage from Schweitzer out of the cluttered attic of his memory. It was to help him do battle with the grim anger still burning inside him at having once more failed the paranormals test for work on the Mass. If there was anything he believed in utterly himself, it was the cool, clean thought the old humanitarian had laid out in that passage; but the hot flame of his own alwaystooready fury was hard to put down. He knew as well as he knew his own heartbeat, that he had the special ability to pass that test. Only, it had been as if something was deliberately tripping him as he took it . . .

A sudden shrieking of railcar brakes and a heavy pressure of deceleration jerked him out of his thoughts. He lifted his head, staring around. Everyone else in the packed city was also staring around. But the brake shriek and the deceleration went on, pressing all their upright bodies hard against the straps of the commuter harnesses that protected them.

With a rough jolt, they stopped. There was a second of absolute silence; then the faint but distinct sounds of two explosions from somewhere ahead of them—so faint, in fact, that they had to come from outside the sterile seal of their car, the middle one of a threecar Commuters Special on this 18:15 run from Chicago to the Wisconsin Dells.

Then the abnormal silence was shattered by a roar of voices. It was a typical crowded day'send run; and everyone in the car's two hundred and forty harnesses seemed to be talking at once, making guesses at what had happened. Chaz himself was strapped in next to the long window running along the right side of the car; but he could see nothing unusual beyond its double thicknesses of glass. Onlya twilight , autumnbrown and weedy landscape of the unsterile outside; a field that might once have been farmed acres was now rough with clumps of aspen saplings and the occasional splash of deadly color from the golden fruit of a Job's berry bush.

He craned his neck, trying to see up along the track forward; but at this spot it curved to the left through a stand of pines and there was nothing to be seen that way, either, but the trees and the bulging windowed right side of the Special's first car.

"Sabotage," said the thin woman in the harness to Chaz ' immediate left. Her face was pale except for small spots of color over her prominent cheekbones; and her voice was tight. "It's always on an evening run like this. The rails are going to be torn up ahead. Our seal will get cracked, somehow; and they'll never let us back into the Dells..."

She closed her eyes and began moving her lips in some silent prayer, or ritual of comfort. She looked to be in her late thirties or early forties—pretty once, but time had been hard on her. The atmosphere in the ear stayed noisy with speculations. After a minute, however, the train jerked and started again, slowly gathering speed. As the car Chaz was in went around the curve and emerged from the trees he got a clear view of what had halted it, spilled on the roadbed to the right of the steel tracks, less than twenty feet beyond the window and himself.

The saboteur had been a man in his midfifties, very thin, wearing only the cutoff trouser lower half of a jumpsuit, with a thick red knit sweater. He had apparently found an old railway speedcart somewhere—a real antique, probably from some infested museum. The little vehicle was nothing more than a platform and motor mounted on railcar wheels. This had been loaded with a number of brown cardboard cartons, possibly containing explosives. With these, he had apparently tried to ram the train head on.

What they had heard must have been two solid missile shots from the computer directed, seventy five millimeter Peace cannon on the first car. One shot had missed. There was a fresh torn hole in the ground, five feet to the right of the tracks. The other had knocked the wheels off one side of the speedcart , and thrown cart, rider, and cargo off the tracks. If there had been explosives in the cartons, they had not gone off—probably stale. Concussion, or something like it, must have killed the saboteur himself; because there was not a mark on him although he seemed obviously dead—his open eyes staring up at the red sunset stains in the haze thick sky, as he lay sprawled on his back by the shattered speedcart .

He was brown skinned and emaciated with the red spots of ulcers on his throat. Plainly in the last stages of Job's-berry rot . . .

There was a long-drawn shudder of breath from the woman in the harness at Chaz ' left. He glanced at her and saw that her face had no color at all now. Her eyes were open again, staring at the dead man.

"He'll have planted something else up ahead to break us open—I know he'll have," she said. Chazlooked away from her uncomfortably. He could not blame anyone for fearing the rot. A single spore could slip through the smallest crack in a sealed environment, be inhaled and take root in human lungs, to grow and spread there until the one who had inhaled it died of asphyxiation. But to see someone living in a constant, morbid fear of it was something that seemed to reach inside him, take hold of a handful of his guts and twist them.

It was the sort of emotional self-torture in which his Neopuritanic aunt and cousins indulged. It had always sickened him to seethem slaves to such a fear, and filled him with a terrible fury against the thing that had made slaves of them. To a certain extent, he felt the same way about all people with whom he shared this present poisoned and bottled up world. The two conflicting reactions had made him a loner—as friendless and self isolated as a man could be under conditions in which people were physically penned up together most of the time, as they were on this train.

He hung in his harness, watching the roadbed gravel alongside the train start to blur in the gathering darkness, as the three cars picked up speed to a normal three hundred kilometers per hour. A pair of animal eyes gleamed at him momentarily from the gloom. Animals were generally free of the rot; research for forty years had yet to find out why. It was dark enough outside now for the window to show him a shadowy image, pacing the rushing train like a transparent ghost, of the lighted car; and himself—

jumpsuited, of average height, with the shock of straight black hair and the face that seemed to be scowling even when it was not . . .

Details of what had happened were being passed back by word of mouth through the rows of commuters ahead of him.

"The heat monitoring screen picked him up through the trees around the curve," the man in front of the woman next to Chaz relayed to the two rows about them, "even before they could see him. But on the screen he was just about the size of a repair scooter. So they held speed, just keyed in the computer on the cannon and waited. Sure enough, once the comp had a clear image, it identified a saboteur, fired, and knocked him out of the way."

He twisted his neck further back over his shoulder to look at the row containing Chaz and the woman.

"Someone up ahead suggested we hold a small penitential gathering for the saboteur," he said. "Anyone back here want to join in?"

"I do," said the woman. She was one of the Neopuritans all right. Chaz shook his head at the man, who turned his own head forward again. A little later, the car attendant came pushing amongst their close ranks, vertically unwinding a roll of thin, silver, floor to ceiling privacy curtain; weaving it in and out among the upright shapes of the harnessed commuters to enclose those who would join in the gathering.

"Both of you here?" the attendant asked Chaz and the woman.

"Not me," saidChar . The attendant took the curtain back on the far side of the woman into the rows behind them; and returned a little later to bring the curtain forward around her other side; so that—in theory at least she and Chaz now occupied separate quarters aboard the packed railway car. Chazhung in his harness, watching the landscape, letting his mind drift. Muffled to faintness by the sound absorption qualities of the privacy curtain, he could hear the gathering getting under way. They had already chosen a Speaker, who was lecturing now.

... remembering the words of the Reverend Michael Brown, twenty three years ago: 'You are all ageneration of Jobs, in sin and pain equally deserving—therefore, if your fellow seems to suffer andnot yourself do not think he or she is more guilty than you, or you more lucky, but only that yourown share and time are merely delayed. They will be coming.' Accordingly, in this gathering, all of us here recognize and admit our guilt toward a sick and polluted Earth, acknowledging that we are no better and no different from that infected and exiled fellow human, who just now would have made us like himself. In token of which we will now commence by singing Job's Doggerel Hymn. Together, now—

"The bitter fires of hell on Earth

Burn inward from periphery,

On tainted soil the world around,

The breeding grounds of Job's-berry.

"Pray we to God of years forgot,

We pray to wood and stone.

Pray we escape from living rot.

Nor do we pray alone.

"In Neopuritanic cell,

In sealed room and citystreet . ."

... Chaz ceased to listen. It was one way to shut out the emotion the hymn evoked. It was not that he was less ethic concerned than others. In his six-by-eight-by-seven foot condominium apartment in the Upper Dells, he had a meditation corner like everyone else; its small tray of dark, sterilized earth hand raked carefully, morning and evening. In addition, however, he had a potassium ferrocyanide crystal growing in nutrient solution, in a flask on the tray. Each morning, and evening as well, he spent a half hour seated in front of that crystal in meditative concentration. But his particular concern during these times was not world sin; or that hebe lucky in avoiding an accident that could expose him to the rot. He meditated with the spiritual grunt and sweat of a man digging a ditch.

He concentrated to develop whatever talent he had for Heisenbergian chain perception, so that he could pass the test for work on the Pritcher Mass. So he could get his hands at last on a chance to do something about the situation that had cowed and was pushing to extinction his huddled people. The idea of humbly accepting his share of humanity's sins had never worked for him. He was built to fight back, even if the fight was hopeless.

If there was indeed such a thing as the chain perception talent, he had decided some time ago, he was going to produce it in himself. And in fact, he felt that he now had. But for some reason he could not seem to make it operate during an examination for work on theMass. This afternoon he had failed for the sixth time; and it had been a simple test. The examiner had spilled a hundred grains of rice, each dyed in one of five different colors, on a table in front of him; and given him achromatic glasses to put on. With the glasses on, the grains had all become one solid, uniform gray—together with the desk, the room, and Mr. Alex Waka , theexaminer. Waka had hid the grains for a second with a sheet of cardboard while he stirred them about. Then he had taken the cardboard away, leaving Chaz to see if he could separate out all the grains of any one color.

Chazhad worked, lining up the grains he selected, so that it would be possible to know afterwards where he had gone right, or wrong. But, when he took the glasses offhe had only seventeen of the twenty red colored grains in line before him. Of the last three grains he had selected, the first two were blue, the last yellow.Strong evidence of paranormal talent—but not proof.

"Damn it!" Chaz had snapped, as close to losing his temper as he ever let himself come nowadays. "I could feel something getting in my way on those last three choices."

Wakanodded.

"No doubt.I don't doubt you feel you did." he answered, sweeping the colored grains back into their box. He was a small, round bodied man dressed in a sand brown jumpsuit, a three inch fringe haircut drooping over the low forehead of his round face. "All really potential Pritcher Mass workers seem to be self convinced of their own talent. But a demonstration of it is what we need; and a demonstration is the one thing you haven't given me."

"How about a catalyst, Mr. Waka ?" Chazasked bluntly. Waka shrugged.

"A lot of hokum, as far as I know," he said. "About as useful as a rabbit's foot, or a lucky charm—a psychological prop but no paranormal talent stimulant."

He looked keenly at Chaz .

"What makes you think something like that might help you?"

"A theory," said Chaz , slowly. "Have you ever heard of the species-mind idea?"

"The notion of some sort of collective unconscious, or subconscious for the human race?" Waka frowned. "That's a cult thing, isn't it?"

"Maybe," said Chaz . "But tell me something else; have you ever grown crystals in a nutrient solution?" Wakashook his head.

"You start out with a seed crystal," Chat.explained , "and this grows by drawing on the saturated chemical solution in which it's immersed—a solution of the same chemical composition as the seed crystal. You have to keep your solution saturated, of course, but eventually your seed crystal grows many times over."

"What about it?" Waka asked.

"Assuming there is some sort of collective unconscious—or even that I just think there's a collective unconscious to draw on," Chaz said, "then suppose I get a catalyst and convince myself it acts like a seed crystal for my paranormal talents, which accrete around it, drawing on the nutrient solution of the collective unconscious of the mass-mind? Would it help?"

Wakashook his head.

"You have to believe you can make our talents work," he said. "That's all know. If this, or a rabbit's foot, or anything can help you believe, then it's going to increase your apparent talents. Only—" His eyes became keen on Chaz . "As I understand it, the catalyst has to be from outside. Unsterile—and illegal." Chazshrugged. He carefully did not answer. He did not have a catalyst yet, in fact; or even one in prospect. But he was curious to hear Waka's reaction to the idea of his making use of something that could get him exiled from the sterile areas if it was found in his possession—in effect, condemned to death; since exposure to the outside meant death from the rot in a few months. "Well," said Waka , after a moment's wait—and his voice changed—"let me tell you something. I believe in the salvation of humanity by one means, and one means only. That's the Pritcher Mass; which is one day going to help us transport a pure and untainted seed community of men and women to some new, clean world; so that the human race can start all over again, free from rot, spiritual as well as physical." He paused. For a moment, he had shed a great deal of the insignificance of his tubby person and foolish haircut; and the pure light of the fanatic shone through.

"That means," he said, returning to his normal manner and tone of voice, "that as far as I'm concerned, my duty to the Mass overrides any other duty I may have, including those to purely local laws. I would not report an examinee using an unsterile object as a catalyst. Am I clear?"

"You're clear," Chaz answered. His opinion of Waka had just gone up a notch or two. But he was still wary of the examiner.

"All right," Waka said, standing up behind his desk. "Then that's that for the present. Anytime you feel you can demonstrate the necessary level of talent, call me.Night or day, at any hour. Otherwise, please remember that, like all examiners for the Mass, I've got a heavy office schedule with other people just as eager as you are to go to work out beyond Pluto's orbit.

Good afternoon, then. May forgiveness beyours. "

"Good afternoon," said Chaz . That was that, he thought now, hanging in his train car harness. Give him a chance at a possible catalyst, and he certainly would not pass it up. As for telling Waka about such a catalyst, in spite of the examiner's hint that he would be on Chaz ' side against, the law in that case, that was something that still required thinking about

Without warning, the world seemed to tilt under him. Train, car, fellow commuters, everything, seemed to fly off at an angle as a terrific pressure robbed him of breath and consciousness at once. He woke to the painful feeling that something hard was digging into the middle ribs on his right side and something rough was pressing against his left elbow. He tried to move away from whatever was digging into his ribs and above him there was a snapping sound. Hefell flat, face down on more of the rough surface that had been pressing against his left elbow.

His head clearing, he became aware that he lay under something dark on what fell like a bed of small rocks. A cold, fresh current of air, laden with outdoor smells, chilled his face. Off to his right there was a variable light source and sounds of voices.

There were other sounds of voices around and above him, in the overhanging darkness. Some made sense, but most were merely sounds of pain and shock. Lifting his head, he saw shapes lumped about him, some making noises and some not.

"They'll never let us in the Dells again," said a toneless voice almost in his ear."Never." It was not memory speaking, but a live and present person. He lifted himself on his hands and looked to his left, farther into the shadow beneath the overhang of darkness. Someone was seated there, as if before an altar, legs crossed; and by the voice it was the woman who had occupied the harness next to him.

He looked in the other direction and forgot her. Suddenly, everything he saw lost its reasonless, separate identity and made sense. The dark shape hanging over him was the railway car he had been in. It had fallen half on its side and broken open, spilling out him and some of the other commuters. He crawled clear of the overhang and sat up. A broken part of his harness still circled his chest. He unbuckled it and let it fall. His head felt hot. The shape of a rock from the railroad ballast was cold under his left hand. He lifted it and laid its coolness against his forehead. The little relief of that touch brought his mind all the way hack into reality.

He was outside, and it was night. The saboteur—or another—had indeed set a second trap for the train, farther down the track. If this was in fact the work of the saboteur they had encountered earlier, then his headon drive at the first car had probably been to reassure the train commander that there was nothing else to fear farther up the line. But how or why the train was wrecked did not matter so much, now. What mattered was that the car Chas was in had broken open.

He was outside .

He was exposed to the rot, potentially infected. According to law, neither he nor any of the other commuters in that particular car could be allowed back into a sterile area again. Oh yes, he would.

The grim refusal to accept what had happened to him exploded instinctively inside him. He was bound for the Pritcher Mass, not doomed to wander a desolated world until he died of starvation or choked on the feathery white fungus growing inside his lungs. In this one case—his own—the inevitable must not be allowed to happen.

He took the rock from his forehead, about to toss it aside—then something stayed his hand. In the flickering light that he now saw come from the burning engine section of the first car, which lay on its side, he looked at the rock; and a word came into his mind.

Catalyst.

This was his chance, if he wanted to take it. A Heisenbergian catalyst, reportedly, was most often something just like this. A piece of wood or stone, not different from any other—illegal only because it was from an unsterilized area as this was. But it was the unsterilized catalysts that were supposed to be the only really effective ones.

Was his talent now telling him that what he held was such a catalyst—the catalyst he needed to demonstrate the talent?

His fingers clamped on the stone. He halfclosed his eyes against the light of the flames forty feet away and forced his mind into channels of choice.

Chainperception—a linked series of optimal choices among the alternates immediately available, leading to a desired end or result.His present desired end or result was simply to get back into a sealed section of the train without anyone finding out that he had been exposed to the rotinfested outer world. He held the rock tightly, searching about in his mind for the next immediate action that would feel as if it would lead him eventually to a safe return to the train.

He stared at the flames. A heavy cargo rescue copter was already on thescene, down on the ground a dozen yards from the tipped over first car. Figures in bulky sterile suits were attaching wide, pipe like sections together into a sterile escape tunnel between the copter and the rooftop airlock on the first car; the only lock available now that the car was on its side. Each of two suited figures carried a section between them. As Chaz watched, another cargo copter settled to the ground by the third car and escape tunnel sections began to emerge there. It was only the second car, then, which had lost its seal; and only its passengers who would be left to starve or rot.

He felt the rough outlines of the rock biting into his palm and his fingers quivered about it. Hold on and make it work, he told himself. Hold . . . he reached out his other hand, out to his left, and his fingers brushed against something soft and clothlike, warm and in some way comforting . . . the sleeve of the woman who had been in the harness beside him.

Abruptly, like a shudder passing through him, came his memory of how she had feared the rot—of how she had feared exactly what had just happened here. She had been exaggerating, of course. The odds were that she, or he, or any of them, would have to spend some days in the open before they would actually inhale rot spores. But probably she would not even try to make use of what little life remained to her. She would simply sit waiting for death, from what he knew of people like her. The terrible double feeling of disgust and pity came back over him; but pity this time was stronger. He could not leave her here to die, just like that. If the catalyst and chain perception could get him safely back into sterile surroundings without it being suspected he had been outside, it could do as much for her and him, together.

Immediately he had made the decision, it felt right in terms of the logic chain perception. Two was for some reason a good number. He leaned toward the woman and closed his hand on the slack of her sleeve.

He pulled, gently. Her murmuring, which had been going on continually all this time, broke off. For a second nothing happened,then she came toward him. Hardly thinking beyond only what seemed to be the reflexes and feelings prompting him, he moved further away from the car, getting to his feet and drawing her after him.

She came like someone in a trance. They stood, both on their feet and together in the night, a little way from the broken second car, with its sounds of despairing and injured people. Still gripping the stone in one hand and her sleeve in the other, he looked again at the sterile suited figures outlined by the flames of the first car. The figures carried the sections by two's, one section between each pair of them. He turned and looked at the suited, figures starting to emerge from the

'copter opposite the last car. They also carried sections, two figures to a section. Two—of course! That was why this series had begun with him first touching, then holding, the woman. He needed someone to help him in this chain of actions.

A feeling of certainty warmed within him. He seemed to feel the linked alternate choices that would bring both of them back to safety. He imagined these choices visible like the edges of a slightly spread deck of cards.The optimal choices of an infinite series of alternates, leading to an inevitable conclusion.

“Come on," he said to the woman. He moved off, towing her after him; and she followed like a young child after a parent.

II

He led her toward the flames and the first car. Now that he had perceived the direction in which his actions tended, he thought he would have preferred to have tried to get into the last car where there was no fire to light the scene. However, evidently his perceptions knew better. Keyed to a high emotional pitch now, he felt clearly that it was the first car rather than the last to which they should go. Hidden in the further dark he came closer to a pair of figures positioning one of the sections. It was this particular pair to which his perceptions had drawn him; and a moment later the perceptions justified their choice, as the two figures moved close together to seal one end of their section to the next—and this in a moment when the two working on the next section had already finished their work and headed back toward the copier.

Chazlet go of the woman and moved softly behind the two figures. For a second, standing just behind them, he hesitated. They were human beings like himself, also human beings on a rescue mission. Then he remembered that these two would consider it their duty to shoot him on sight—and would, with the weapons belted to their suits now for that purpose—if they suspected him of having been one of those exposed to the unsterilized outer environment. It was hard to think like an outlaw. But an outlaw he was now, as much as the saboteur who had wrecked the train.

He stood behind the two and swung the rock overhand, twice. It gave him a hollow feeling inside to see how easily the figures folded to the ground. One by one he dragged them away from the tube and the light of the flames, to where the woman still stood.

She was stirring now, coming out of her shock. It was too dark to see her face except as a gray blur; but she spoke to him.

"What is it . . . ?" she said. "How ... ?"

Chazbent over one of the figures and with fumbling haste began to unseal the closure down the front of the suit.

"Get into one of these!" he told her. She hesitated. "Get moving! Do you want to see the Dells again, or don't you?"

The magic effect of the last phrase seemed to reach her. She bent over the other figure and Chaz heard the faint rasp of the seal on its suit being peeled open.

He forgot her for a moment and merely concentrated on getting into the suit of the limp body at his own feet. He got it off and struggled into it, tucking his catalyst stone into a pocket of his jumpsuit first. Luckily, these sterile suits were all sized—expandable and contractable , variable in arm and leg length. Standing with it on at last, and resealing the closure, he looked once more at the woman and saw she was just stepping into her own suit.

He waited impatiently until she was in and sealed. Then, by gestures, he had her help him drag the two still unmoving forms back toward the tube. The tube was completed now, and one suited figure was standing farther down by the airlock entrance in its middle section, checking in the other figureswho were lined up ready to enter. Leaving the two they had deprived of their suits, Chaz took the arm of the woman and led her circuitously through darkness. They joined the line. It moved slowly forward; and a minute later they, too, filed through the tube airlock. Behind them, the suited figurewho had been checking the others in entered, and sealed the inner airlock door.

The other figures were now heading down the tube toward the first railway car. Chaz pushed the woman in her suit ahead of him and followed them. Around them, there was the hissing sound of sterilizing gas being pumped in. It would clean not only the interior of the tube, but the exteriors of their suits—in fact, destroying any rot spores they had not actually inhaled. The hissing ceased before they caught up with the other figures at the end of the tube.

The other figures were standing, waiting, by the roof airlock of the railway car. After a second, there was the distant whir of fans sucking out the gas,then the lighting tubes in the ceiling of the tunnel blinked twice. Two figures next to the airlock began working with it; and to the creak of metal hinges not recently used, it was swung open.

The inner airlock door took a moment longer to open. Then it too yawned wide and the figures began to disappear into the dark interior of the car.

Within, the lights of the car were out. It was a horizontal pit of darkness, filled with moans and crying. The suited figures turned on the headlamps of their helmets.

" Limpet lights!" roared a powerful voice abruptly in Chaz ' ears. He started, before realizing that it was the suit intercom he was hearing. There was a pause, hut the darkness persisted. The voice came again.

"For God's sake, didn't anyone think to bring limpets? First team back bring half a dozen and stickthem around the walls in here. We need lights! All right, let the ones who can walk find their ownway out, look for whoever's pinned, hurt, or can't walk."

The woman had turned her headlamp on in automatic reflex to seeing the lamps go on around her. Chaz reached up to his own helmet, fumbled with thickgloved fingers, found a toggle by the lamp lens and pushed it. It moved sideways and a beam of light revealed a tangle of harnesses and bodies before him. He reached out, took the glove of the woman again, and started pushing through the tangle toward the rear of the car with her in tow.

They moved until, turning his head, he saw that they were safely screened by the passengers around them from the other suited figures. Then Chaz looked about, playing his helmet fight on the crying, struggling mass of passengers.

"All right, all right! Get them moving!" boomed the voice over the in-tercom on his eardrums. A small man, apparently unhurt and free of his harness, was among those worming their way toward the open airlock behind Chaz and the woman. Chaz barred his way.

"Lie down," Chaz said; and then realized that even if his voice was somehow coming through the suit's outside speaker, it could not have been heard by the man in this bed-lam.

Chazmade motions to the other man and moved around him, taking him by the shoulders. He waved to the woman to take the man's feet. The woman's bulky-suited figure only stood staring at him. Angrily, Chaz gestured; and at last she stooped and picked up the feet. To-gether, clumsily, they carried the man from the car into the tube.

He had struggled slightly at first on being picked up, then quieted and hung limp and heavy in their grasp. They sweated with him through the crowd to the airlock and into the tube. It was surprisingly empty. The injured near the airlock were blocking the way for those fur-ther backwho could have walked out under their own power.

Chazand the woman carried the man down the tube. As they ap-proached the airlock through which they had entered, Chaz stopped and motioned to the woman to put the feet of their burden down. It took her a moment to under-stand him, as it had taken her a mo-ment to understand that she was to help pick the man up. Then, she obeyed. Chaz lifted the man upright and gave him a push toward the copter end of the tube. He did not seem to understand at first, any more than the woman had. He stared at them for a second,then tottered off in the direction Chaz had indicated. The tube about them was empty except for one limping, older man who hardly looked at them as he passed. Chaz let him by, then opened the inner door of the tube airlock and stepped into the lock it-self. He motioned the woman in be-hind him,then closed the inner door on them both. He took hold of the top end of the seal to his suit and started to take it off; but his fingers hesitated. There was a feeling inside him. Not a per-ceptive feeling of the sort that had brought him this far, but simply an emotional reluctance to leave the two men he had struck outside, to rot and die as he might have rotted and died.

He let go of the seal strip, waved back the woman when she started to accompany him, and opened the outer door of the airlock. The two he had hit were not hard to find. One was now sitting up, dazed, the other was evidently still unconscious.

Chazhelped the dazed one to his feet, took him back through the air-lock and pushed him into the corri-dor, aiming him toward the copter end of the tube. The man stumbled off like a zombie. Chaz went back and dragged the other's limp figure into the lock. With the woman's help, he shoved it into the tube dur-ing a moment when no one else was about, then closed the inner door again and began taking off his suit.

The woman imitated him. As soon as they were out of their suits, Chaz once more opened the inner door of the lock a crack and peered out. The man they had carried in from out-side was gone. There were no suited figures in view, but the tube was now full of walking refugees from the first car. None of them paid any attention to Chaz and the woman. Boldly, Chaz led the way out into the crowd that now thronged the tube, and turned to seal the airlock inner door behind them. They followed the others about them into the copter, where attendants were ushering those unhurt through a room with cots into an-other filled with regular airbus seats, four abreast on either side of an aisle, where the walking refugees from the train were being seated and strapped in.

Chazstepped back from the woman, pushing her away when she tried automatically to follow him.

"Forget you ever saw me!" he whispered harshly to her, and faded back into the crowd. As he was being strapped into a seat, he saw her ush-ered to one some three rows ahead of him, on the opposite side of the aisle.

Moments later, a white-suited at-tendant came by with a clipboard. Chaz slipped his hand into the pocket holding the stone and grasped it tightly.

"Name?" the attendant asked. Chaz had to clear his throat before he could speak.

"Charles Roumi Sant ," he said.

"Address?"

"Wisconsin Dells, Upper Dells 4J537, Bayfors Condominium 131,apartment1909 ."

"Good," the attendant noted it. "Was anyone with you on the train?" Chaz shook his head.

"Do you see anyone here you rec-ognize from the car you were in?" Chaz' heart beat heavily but stead-ily. He hesitated, gripping the stone in his pocket. Silence was bad. A negative answer was even more dan-gerous in case of a later checkup on the rescued passengers.

'There, I think," he said, nodding toward the woman."That lady there, three up and two to the left."

"Right."The attendant wrote and passed on. Later, Chaz saw him talk-ing to the woman and her head turn slightly, directing the attendant's gaze hack toward him. The attendant looked at him, glanced at his clip-board and told her something, then moved ahead.

Chazsank back into his seat. Clearly, she had also had the sense to identify him as someone she had seen in the first car, thereby con-firming his own story. With luck . ..he rubbed his fingers over the stone.

. . there would be no more check-ing; and his name and hers would be buried in the list of those from the first car. But even in the case of a checkup, there was now a report he had been seen in the first car. Even if that car had been completely filled, as the second had been, dead bodies were never removed; and a head count of survivors should not show any extra passengers.

"Hot chocolate, sir?"

Attendants were going up and down the aisle now, offering hot drinks. Like most of those about him Chaz accepted one. It was an unusu-ally rich, real-tasting drink that might have been made with actual chocolate. He sat sipping it, letting relief flow through him with the warmth of the liquid. The stone bulked hard in his pocket and a little fire of triumph burned inside him. The woman dared not talk and nei-ther of the suited workers had had a chance to see the faces of either the woman or himself. After a while the copter took off and about that time, unexpectedly, he fell asleep.

He woke with a start to find the copter already landed at Central Terminal, Wisconsin Dells. It took him a few seconds to remember what he was doing in the aircraft; and when memory did return it brought first incredulity, then alarm. There could have been a sedative in the hot chocolate. If he had been searched while he was unconscious—he clutched hastily at the pocket of his jumpsuit and the hard shape of the rock reassured him. He glanced around for the woman, but could not see her. Most of the other passengers were already up out of their seats and crowding the aisle on their way out. He joined them, left the copter and went down two levels to the Per-sonal Transit System. An area had been roped off for the survivors of the train wreck and they did not have to wait for cars. He got one al-most immediately and programmed it for his condominium in the Upper Dells. Five minutes later he was in the subbasement lobby of the con-dominium.

He had hoped to get quietly to his room on the nineteenth level. In spite of his sleep on the ‘copter he felt as if he had just put in a nonstop forty-eight-hour day. But a fellow apartment owner was checking her delivery box in the lobby and recog-nized him. It was Mrs. Alma Doxiels , a stern, tall, fat woman—one of the condominium party-organizers. "Mr. Sant !" she called. "We heard about the 18:15 wreck on the news. Were you—"

Chaznodded, ducking into an ele-vator tube that had a platform rising by at the moment. The platform car-ried him up and away from the con-tinuing sound of her voice.

"Pray penitent, Mr. Sant . Pray pen—"

He reached the nineteenth level and was glad to see that nowhere up and down the narrow, silver-car-peted corridor was anyone in sight. He went hastily, to his apartment, stuck his thumb in the lock and strode in, as the apt-comp recog-nized his print and opened the door. He was two strides inside and the door had clicked closed again behind him, when he saw he was not alone. A girl in a sand-green tweed jumpsuit was seated in lotus position facing the red crystal on the tray in his meditation corner. She turned sharply at the sound of his and he saw that her face was drawn and her eyes reddened.

For a moment he could not place her. Then he remembered. She was another neighbour , from the sixteenth level. They had met at one of Mrs. Doxiel’s gatherings in the condominium party rooms, several moths ago—a long evening, the later hours of which had been more than a little blurred, as far as Chaz was concerned. His imperfect memory the next morning had been that this particular girl had not shared his blurriness and had even given him to understand that she found it more than a little disgusting in him to be that drunk.

Which did not explain how she happened to be here now in his locked apartment when he himself was away from home.He stared at her, baffled. Then understanding broke through.

"Did I key the lock to your print, that night?" he asked.

She scrambled to her feet and turned to face him. She was a tall girl—he remembered that now—with long brown hair and gray eyes, and a soil, gentle face. Not pretty, not beautiful—attractive, in a way that neither of those two words fitted.

"Yes," she said. "You wouldn't go in unless I let you key it in. I just let you key it to get you to give up and lie down."

"You didn't . . ." he hesitated, "stay?"

"No," she shook her head.

He stood staring at her, knowing what he wanted to ask her but trying to think of some polite way of phras-ing it. She solved the problem for him.

"I suppose you wonder what I'm doing here now," she said. "I've never been here since that night."

"That's what I was wondering," he said.

"The news of the train wreck was on the cube," she said. "A lot of people knew it was the train you take. I thought maybe it would help if I meditated here, at your own cor-ner, for you." She tossed her hair back on her shoulders. "That's all."

"I see," Chaz said.

Without thinking he slid his hand into his jumpsuit pocket and brought it out holding the stone. He stepped past her to place it on the tray of sterilized earth next to the flask with the crystal. He turned back to face her; and only then realized how odd it must look—what he had just done.

"I was bringing it home . . ." he said. He looked more closely at her face and eyes. "But it's strange. I mean you being here, meditating—"

He broke off, suddenly aware he was talking his way into dangerous areas.

"And you being one of the lucky people to live through the wreck be-hind sealed doors?" she asked.

"Why? Or don't you believe in the aid of meditation?"

"It's not that," he said, slowly. "I'm trying to see the interlock—per-ceive the chain of connection."

"Oh?" She sounded both relieved and a little annoyed, for no reason he could imagine. "That'sright, of course, it's that Heisenbergian per-ceptive ability you're so concerned with.The one that can qualify you to work on the Pritcher Mass.The one that drives you to drink."

"It doesn't drive me to drink!" he said; and then, hearing the anger in his voice, he wondered why the way she put things should stir him up. "Sometimes I build up a sort of charge—you wouldn't understand. There's no use my explaining."

"No, I don't understand!" she sounded as stirred up as he was. "But I don't see why that should stop you from explaining. In fact, you—"

She checked herself and bit her lip. He stared at her curiously.

"Owe—" he began but the sound of the door-call interrupted him with its soft chime. "Excuse me." He went to the door and opened it. Outside was the woman from the train.

He stared at her, for a second stopped dead by the shock of seeing her here. She had somehow found time to change her jumpsuit—it was not im-possible that she had stepped into a store on the way here and bought a new one. At any rate, the one she wore now was a gray-pink color—an almost startling shade compared to the usual browns, grays and blacks most people wore; and above it she had even touched up her face with artificial coloring.

She smiled at him.

"We ought to have a talk," she said. "You see, I saw you with the stone; and you still have it, don't you?" She walked forward past him through the door.

"Yes, I can see it there in your med-corner," she said. "You and I have a lot in common—" She broke off, staring at the girl from three levels down. Her face stayed fixed in that stare; and abruptly the artificial color on it seemed to stand out, garish and un-natural.

Hastily, Chaz closed the door and swung on her.

"Are you crazy?" he said. "We shouldn't be seen together. Don't you understand that?" Still staring at the girl, she an-swered him.

"I understand you carried away an unsterile object from the wreck," she said, flat-voiced. "I got your name from the man who checked us, on the copier. But you don't know who I am, or anything about me. I can in-form on you, any time."

"You'd be informing on yourself at the same time!" he said.

"I don't have anything unsterile that's been brought in from outside," she said. "An anonymous phone call is all it'd take for you. Even if you throw that stone away this minute, the police could find traces of its having been here."

"Oh?" Chaz said grimly."Maybe not. What's it matter to you anyway? I saved your life—isn't that enough for you?"

"No." Now she did look at him. "My life was nothing to write home about anyway. And for all I know I'm infected with rot right now."

"Don't be crazy!" he said. Once more, he remembered her almost sick fear of being exposed on the train before it had been wrecked. "We were only exposed to the out-side for a matter of minutes. The odds are a million to one against any infection."

"There's still that chance," she said. "That's why no one is ever let back in once they've been exposed. With my luck, I've probably got it. You've probably got it, too." She looked once more at the girl. "I suppose you've already infected her."

"Of course not!What're you talk-ing about? What do you want, any-way?" he exploded. Her eyes came back to him.

"My husband died when we were both twenty-two," she said. I was left with twins and a new baby. Three children. With ten women to every seven men, who wants a widow with three children? I couldn't even qualify for a job. I had to sit home on basic income and bring my family up. Now my kids are in their teens and they don't care about me. If I'm going to die from the rot in a few weeks, I want some little taste out of life."

She stared directly at him.

"You've got a job, and extra income," she said. "I want every-thing you can give me." She looked for a last time at the girl. "I was going to suggest something like a partnership; but I see now that wouldn't work."

She turned around and went to the door.

"I'll call you," she said. "And you better answer the call after you get it, if I don't catch you in. I've got noth-ing to lose."

She opened the door and went out. It clicked closed behind her. Out of the corner of his eye, Chaz saw the girl also moving toward the door.

"Wait!" he said desperately, put-ting out a hand to stop her. "Wait. Please don't go—" Then the walls seemed to move in on him, inexorably, and he went spinning off into unconsciousness. III

Chazwas having a curious, fever-ish sort of dream. He was dreaming that the Pritcher Mass was not way out beyond Pluto, but right here on Earth. In fact he had already been at work on the Mass, using his catalyst; and he had startled all the other workers on it with his ability. Al-ready he had made contact with a possible habitable world in a system under a GO star, a hundred and thirty light-years distant. Projecting his consciousness outward from the Mass to that world, he had arrived mentally in an alien city of cartoon-type towers and roadways all leaning at crazy angles. Great snails slid along the roadways, on a thin film of flowing water that clung to every sur-face, vertical as well as horizontal. An insectile alien like a seven-foot--tall praying mantis had met him and they were talking.

". . . You've got an obligation to answer me," Chaz was arguing.

"Perhaps," said the Mantis. "The fact remains that you're pretty tough-minded.Aggressive."

"You change schools every three or four months all the time you're growing up," said Chaz , angrily—it was the sort of thing his cousins were always throwing at him—"and you'll be tough, too. You know what it's like to fight your way through a fresh roomful of kids every few months? My father was a construction engi-neer and he was always moving from one job to the next—"

"That's not the point," said the Mantis. "The point is where do you go from here? Think before you an-swer."

"I know that one," said Chaz . "There's no limit, of course."

"There are very definite limits," replied the Mantis.

Consciousness returned. Opening his eyes, Chaz found himself back in his own apartment. He felt clear-headed again, but utterly weak and listless. For a long moment he was puzzled by his view of the room; and then he realized he was staring at its ceiling. He was lying on the floor with his head on the knees of the brown-haired girl. She knelt, supporting his head, her own face bending over him and her long hair falling about her face and his like a privacy curtain. She was stroking his head and singing to herself, so softly he could hardlyhear, some nonsense song.

" GaestThou down we Chicago, sae fair?

Harp at ye, carp at ye, water and wine.

Think'st thou my name, but once thou art there,

So shalt thou be a true love o' mine.

" Bidstme I'll build thee a cradle o' withys

Harp at ye, carp at ye . . .”

Music and words had a faintly fa-miliar ring, although the words were not the same as those he had heard with that tune before.

"Of course," he said, speaking out loud unthinkingly." Scarborough Fair.The spell-song!" She stopped singing immediately, staring down at him. He got a feeling that he had said the wrong thing, somehow shattering an important moment.

"Is that what it is?" she said in an odd voice. "It's just an old song my mother used to sing. You folded up, all of a sudden. I . . . didn't know what else to do."

"It's a mnemonic," he said. "That was the way medieval so-called witches used to remember the in-gredients for a love potion. Parsley, sage, rosemary . . . Wait a min-ute—" he interrupted himself. "But that wasn't the way you sang it."

"It's only a song," she said. "I didn't know it meant anything. I just had to do something. Are you hurt?" More concern sounded in her last three words than she might have in-tended; because she looked away from him as soon as she said it. He felt a tremendous desire not to move at all; but just to keep on lying where he was and let everything else—the sterile areas, the unsterile land, even the Pritcher Mass itself, all go to hell. But, of course, things were not that simple.

With an effort he sat up. "Hurt?" he said. "No."

He got to his feet. She got to hers. "You know," he said, "forgive me…but I don't seem to be able to remember your name."

"Eileen," she said. "Eileen Monvain . You're in trouble, aren't you?" He opened his mouth to deny it—but she had been standing here all the time he had been talking to the woman from the train.

"It looks like it," he said.

"You actually were . . . outside?In the train wreck?"

He nodded.

"So maybe she's right—I've al-ready infected you," he said.

"Oh, no."Her answer was quick. "You couldn't—but that woman can make trouble for you."

"I suppose," he said grimly.

Eileen said nothing, only stood looking at him as if she was waiting for something. He stared back curi-ously for a moment—and then forgot her, as he remembered the catalyst. He turned back to the corner and picked it up. With it in his hand he feltmore sure ; and he began to think clearly.

"I'd probably better get out of here," he said.

"I’ll help you," said Eileen.

He stared at her again.

"Why?"

She did not color or hesitate; but he got the feeling—perhaps it was something the catalyst had stimu-lated in him—that the question em-barrassed her.

"You're too valuable to be thrown away just because of someone like her," Eileen said. "You're going to do something out on the Pritcher Mass that'll help the human race."

"How do you know?" Chaz asked.

"You don't remember?" she said. "You talked to me about it for three hours down in the amusement area, that night of the party; and for nearly an hour up here, standing outside your door, before I could get you to go in and go to bed."

The ghost of a memory troubled the back of Chaz ' mind. For a mo-ment he almost remembered.

"That's right," he said, frowning. "We sat in the corner booth near the swimming pool; and you kept hand-ing me drinks—"

"You got your own drinks—too many of them!" she said, swiftly. "Anyway, you told me what it was you hoped to do out on the Mass, when you got there. That's why I was in here praying for you, just now. I didn't want to see you wasted after what you said you'd planned to do on theMass. "

"Planned?" he said. "I'm only try-ing to get on the staff out there, be-cause it's someplace things are hap-pening—not like here on Earth."

She looked at him brilliantly, but did not answer. He gave the matter up, turning to the drawers of his built-in dresser and opening them one by one to get any small personal articles that could be stuffed in the pocket of a jumpsuit. Clothes and toilet articles were no problem. He could pick those up as he needed them in any twenty-four-hour store.

"Maybe if she comes back a few times," he said, "and finds me gone, she'll give up.It's worth the chance, anyway."

He finished stuffing his pockets, turned and opened the door to the apartment.

"Here we go," he said, ushering Eileen out into the corridor and fol-lowing her. He closed the door be-hind him,then turned to face her, suddenly feeling a little awkward. "Well, good-bye. And thanks for thinking of me, when you heard about the train wreck."

"Not good-bye," she said. "I told you I was going to help you. Where do you think you'll go now?"

"I'll get a PRT car and make up my mind as I go."

"And what if she's already gone to the police?" Eileen asked. "The police can check and find the record of your credit card. Every credit card used on the Personal Rapid Transit is recorded, you know that!"

"Then I'll walk to the nearest auto-hire" he broke off.

"Then you'll have to use your credit card there, too, won't you? You can't rent a u-drive without a credit charge," she said. "There's no regular way you can get out of the Dells without leaving a trail of credit records for Central Computer. I tell you, let me help you. I can get you out another way." He gazed at her for a long mo-ment,then suddenly the humor of the situation struck him. He laughed.

"All right," he said. "What kind a route have you got up your sleeve?"

"I'll show you," she said. "We'll need help; though. Come down to my apartment first." He followed her as they took an elevator disc down to her level. She led the way to an apartment door and pressed her right thumb on the sensitized plate. Reacting to the pat-tern of her thumbprint, the lock snicked back and the door swung open. Glancing in, Chaz saw an apartment like his own and everyone else's in this area of the Dells. Then a chittering , whining noise drew his attention to a corner of the room be-hind an extruded sofa; and a strange creature came out into the center of the apartment. It was a black-furred animal which seemed to grow as it emerged; until finally in the center of the room it was the size of a middling-sized dog, only much more heavily furred. It had a long black bushy tail, a sharp muzzle, and eyes that glittered with what seemed to be more intelli-gence than a nonhuman creature should have. Eileen was talking to it in a strange mutter of syllables the moment she opened the door; and when she stopped the creature an-swered with its own chittering , whin-ing and near-barking in something that had all the cadence of a human reply.

"My pet," said Eileen, turning to Chaz . "He's a wolverine. I call him Tillicum."

"Tillicum?" said Chaz , as jolted by the name as the identity of the spe-cies to which Eileen's pet belonged.

He had never expected to hear of, much less see, a wolverine in the sterile areas outside of a zoo. "You call him Tillicum?"

"Yes. Why?" Eileen was staring at him penetratingly again.

"No reason," said Chaz . "It's just that the name means 'friend' in the North Pacific Coast Indian dialects; and I'd always heard wolverines weren't all that friendly."

"You know Indian languages?" Eileen asked.

"No," said Chaz . "It's just that my head's cluttered like an old-fash-ioned attic, with all sorts of informa-tion about this and that. Like that song you were singing to the tune of Scarborough Fair, back in my apart-ment—" he broke off. "It doesn't matter. You mean it was Tillicum you said we needed?"

"Yes," said Eileen. She took a half-size limpet light and some other small items from one of the drawers built into the wall beside her, then turned. "Come on."

She led the way out of the apart-ment. This time it was Chaz who fol-lowed, Tillicum at his heels.

"Where are we going?" Chaz asked as they started off down the corridor, only to stop and turn in, short of the elevator tubes, through the door leading to the emergency stairs.

"To the basement," said Eileen. She did not offer to say anything more; and he followed her down the green-painted concrete steps of the stairwell that echoed to the sound of their footfalls, but not to those of Tillicum, padding noiselessly beside them.

The walk down seemed longer than Chaz had expected. He found himself trying to think when he had last traveled up or down in a build-ing by any way other than elevator—and found he could not remember doing so since he had been a boy. Fi-nally, however, they came to a point where the stairs ended. A heavy fire door with a bar latch faced them. Ei-leen leaned on it, and they went through. They came out into a small room with the same bare, green-painted cement walls, floor and ceiling. An-other door stood in the wall to their right, with a ventilator grille to its left about six feet off the floor. Warn air poured noiselessly from the grille; and Chaz found he welcomed it. The starkness of the concrete surroundings made the room seem chilly, whether it was really so or not. Ignoring the door, which was labeled with a sign No Admittance Authorized Personnel Only just above the small, silver square of the lock, Eileen stepped to the ventilator shaft and took from her pocket a rectangular brown box small enough to be hidden in her fist. She pressed this to each corner of the ventilator grill. The grille fell off, revealing the small, square black entrance to the ventilating duct.

"Why not open the door, instead, if you've got a full-band vibration key?" Chaz asked, curiously.

"Because the cycle and pitch on that door lock is changed every week by remote control from Central Computer," she answered without turning her head. "The ventilator fastenings are standard. Central doesn't worry about it because it's too small for anyone hut a child to get into; and just inside there's a set of weighted bars too heavy for a child to lift."

"Then we're out of luck on two counts," said Chaz . "Nochild, and a child would be too weak, any-how."

"Tillicum can do it," she said calmly.

She looked at the wolverine. Tilli-cum leaped the full six feet to the duct entrance with surprising ease and vanished inside it. Eileen turned from the opening back to Chaz .

"It'll take a few minutes," she said.

"Tillicum can get inside that way," Chaz said."But how about us?"

"He'll open the door for us. It's not locked from the inside," Eileen said.

"You mean," Chaz said, "he can handle ordinary doorknobs, or what-ever they've got there on the other side?"

"Yes," she said.

Chazfell into a doubtful silence. But a moment later the door swung open in front of them; and Tillicum looked up at them, red-lined mouth half open as if in laughter.

"Come on," said Eileen.

They went in through the door, and down a corridor perhaps ten me-ters in length to where another door stood ajar, held that way by a large cardboard carton that had been pushed between it and the jamb. Chaz looked thoughtfully from the carton to Tillicum.

Through the second door they came to a wide, brightly lit tunnel, down the center of which ran a broad conveyer belt moving at not much more than a walking speed. Where they stood was a broad place in the tunnel, nearly filled with some sort of automatic machinery, half of which was accepting refuse from the condominium above, packaging it in cartons and sending it out on the conveyer belt, while the other half accepted cartons from those on the belt, broke them open and dis-patched the merchandise, food, or other contents within them upstairs to the apartments to which they were addressed. Chaz looked at the ma-chinery curiously. Everybody knew about this delivery system, but he, like most, had never seen it in action.

"Good," he said to Eileen. "I ride the conveyer down to Central Pro-cessing, sneak upstairs to theTrans-portationCenter and I ought to be able to manage to get on a night freight train forChicago without trouble. Once inChicago , I can hide out until I can qualify for theMass. "

"You're that sure you can qual-ify'?" she said.

He looked at her, a little surprised. "I thought you believed in my working on the Mass," he answered.

"As a matter of fact," he felt in his pocket for the catalyst and found it still safely there, "I am that sure."

"All right," she said, "but you'll never make it toChicago on your own. For one thing, there're in-spectors patrolling this whole con-veyer system all the time." She turned to the wolverine."Tillicum!" Tillicum leaped up on top of the machine which was filling empty car-tons with refuse from the apartments above. Reaching down with one paw and surprising strength, he flipped a large, empty carton from the ma-chine to the floor,then jumped back down to join Eileen and Chaz . Eileen had already produced a small self-powered knife; it hummed cheerfully as its vibrating blade slit the carton open vertically. She cut the top and bottom surfaces as well as the one vertical face of the carton; and then, with Tillicum humping forward to help, spread the container open like an antique wardrobe trunk.

"Yes," she said, peering into its empty interior."Plenty of space ... Tillicum!" The wolverine, reacting as if he could read her mind, pushed the car-ton together again and shoved it across the floor to the conveyer belt itself.Then, taking it between both forelegs almost like a human, he jerked it upward until it tumbled onto the belt and began to be carried away. Tillicum leaped after it, and stuck his claws in the carton, setting it upright once more.

"Come on. Hurry!" said Eileen.jumping up on the belt. Chaz stared for a split second,then followed her. She was already walking down the belt toward Tillicum and the carton. When he caught up with them, she had opened the carton along her cut, and was already crawling inside.

"Come on!" she said.

Chazfrowned, but followed her. A second later, Tillicum slid in beside them and. hooking his claws in the carton, pulled the carton closed. It was a tight fit with all three of them, but the box-shape finally closed ex-cept for a crack and they were in al-most total darkness. There was a faint sucking sound and a second later illumination filled the carton's interior from the limpet light Eileen had just attached to the side above her head.

In its white glare Chaz found him-self and Eileen sitting facing each other with their knees almost touch-ing. Tillicum was somehow curled up around their legs and under those knees.

"But why do you want to come with me?" Chaz said.

"I told you you couldn't get out on your own," she answered. "I'm tak-ing you someplace safe where you can wait until I can arrange to get you away."

"You're taking a chance, too," he reminded her. "Remember I've been outside? These are pretty close quarters to avoid being infected from me."

. "I'm perfectly safe!" she said im-patiently. "Never mind that—" She broke off. "What are you going `

hm-m-m' about?"

Chazhad not realized he had made any audible sound. "Nothing," he said. "Just, yourname—never mind. What was it you were going to say?"

"I was saying, never mind that. We're as close to being safe from in-spectors in this carton as we can be. Now's the chance to stop and think about covering your tracks. Do you have anybody who might come look-ing for you when you don't show up?"

"The office will probably call, if I don't show up there tomorrow morn-ing," he said. "I've qualified for work in the Records Research Section at theIllinoisStateCenter ."

"I know," Eileen said. "You told me, that night in the amusement rooms. It's a pretty good job nowadays, with ten people waiting for ev-ery opening there is, just to keep from sitting on their hands doing nothing."

"It's the kind of work where that cluttered memory attic in my head comes in useful," he said. "But I don't think they'll miss me too much, even if they call a couple of times and get no answer. As you say, there's too many other people wait-ing to take my place."

"Good," said Eileen, "How about relatives? No relatives?"

"I didn't tell you that?" he asked, a little dryly:

"Oh, that's right. Your cousins, and your aunt." she said. "You did mention them. But I think you said you didn't get along with them."

"I don't," he said. "They took me in toraise after my father died, and my mother had been dead three years. My uncle was all right—as long as he lived—but my aunt and their kids were poisonous."

"So, they wouldn't wonder about you if you disappeared suddenly?"

"No." said Chaz . He reached into his pocket and took a firm grip on the stony surface of the catalyst.

"And now that I've set your mind at ease about that, how aboutyou doing the same for me? Don't you thinkit's safe now to tell me where you're taking me, and who it is you're delivering me to?" IV

She did not answer for a long mo-ment, but sat staring at him in the brilliant light from the limpet. In spite of the current of air that the belt's motion pushed through the narrow gap left where the cut side and top of the carton were not completely joined together, these close quarters were becoming stuffy. Chaz thought he caught a faint, skunky odor from the wolverine at their feet.

"What are you talking about?" she said at last. "Deliver you?To whom?"

"It's just a guess," he answered, still holding on to the rock. In one corner of his thoughts was the plan that if the wolverine turned on him, he would try to shove the stone down its throat—this would at least give him some kind of fighting chance. "But I don't think it's too bad a one. I mentioned this cluttered attic mind of mine. Match that up to a talent for chain-perception and too many things about this situation seem to hook together."

"For example?"Her face was set and her voice was brittle. When he did not answer immediately, she went on. "Who am I supposed to be delivering you to?"

"I don't know." he said."The Citadel?"

The air hissed suddenly between her teeth on a sharp intake of breath.

"You're saying I'm connected with the criminal underworld?" she snapped. "What gives you theright—

who do you think I am, anyway?"

"A Satanist?" he said, question-ingly.

She made another faint breathing noise; but this time it was the sound of the breath going out of her as if knocked out by a sudden, unex-pected blow. She stared at him with eyes that were abruptly round with disbelief.

"Can you read minds?" she said faintly.

He shook his head.

"No," he said, "I don't pretend to any paranormal talents—except for chain-perception. You ought to know there's no such thing as true telepaths, anyway."

"There's other ways to know things," she said, still a little obscurely. "What makes you say I'm a Satanist?"

"A lot of little things," he said."Your name, for one."

"My name?"

" Mortvain," he said. "If you were a French-speaking knight in the middle ages, with that as a motto under the heraldic achievement on your shield, I'd be pretty sure you were defying death."

"Death?"She shook her head. "Me? I defy death?"

"Don't you?" he answered. "At least twice you've told me that you're not afraid of my infecting you with rot, in spite of the fact you know I've been exposed; and we're jammed in here so close now that you could hardly help getting spores from my breath if I've already been infected."

"I just meant ... I don't believe you could have been infected," she said."A short time outside like that."

"How do you know how long I was outside?"

"Well, it couldn't have been long. Anyway, what's that got to do with my name?"

"I think you already know," he said." Mortvain. Mortvain , from the Old French mon , meaning 'death'

and en vein—meaning 'without success', or perhaps 'in a blasphemous manner'. Freely translated, your name could mean 'I defy death' or 'I blaspheme against death'."

"That's nonsense," the girl said.

"You're saying, then, that you don't hold with Satanist beliefs?" he said, watching her closely.

"I'm not—there's no reason why should," she said. "Naturally, I'm not against someone else's pattern of ethos-involvement, any more than anyone else is. But that doesn't mean I've got anything to do with Satan-ists. Only—I'm not on trial. I don't have to assure you of anything."

"Of course not," Chaz said. "But it's a fact there are people among the Satanists who consider themselves witches. And these witches recite spells, pray rather than meditate, have animals they consider familiars and believe that they can defy death itself as long as they are in love with a particular concept of evil. Also, as a matter of fact, they actually are supposed to be involved with orga-nized crime."

"No," she said, her eyes half-closed as if he was questioning her under duress.

"No what?" he asked. "No, you're not involved with organized crime? Or no, you're not a witch?" Her eyes opened at that. She even smiled faintly.

"Have you stopped beating your wife?" she murmured. "What kindof a choice are you giving me?" Her smile made him smile back in spite of himself. But he stuck to the point.

"All right," he said. "I put the question badly. Bluntly—are you someone who thinks she's a witch?"

"And if I was?" she said. "What t difference would it make? I'm helping you anyway."

"Or delivering me to someone."

"No!" she said, suddenly and violently. "I'd never turn you over, to anyone. I'm no criminal—and no Satanist!" The violence leaked out of her unexpectedly: and she looked at him again squarely. "But, all right. You're not wrong about one thing. I am a witch. Only it's pretty plain you don't know anything about what that means."

"I thought I'd just shown you I know quite a bit," Chaz said.

"And they say prejudice is dead!" Her voice was bitter. "Haven't you ever learned that witches always were people with paranormal talents, who had no place else to go in the past, but into devil-worshiping communities? You'd be pretty upset if I called you a Satanist, just because you believe you've got a talent for Heisenbergian chain-perception."

Chazhad to admit to himself that this was true.

"You turned up pretty conveniently right after the wreck and before the woman came, though," he said.

"I've got paranormal talents too, of course!" she flared. "Why do you think I concern myself with you?

Because we're both different. We're both on the outside, shut away from ordinary people, looking in. That's why it mattered to me what happened to you!"

"I don't consider myself on the outside looking in," he said, ob-scurely angry.

"Oh, no?" her voice was scornful. She went on as if reciting from a dossier. "Charles Roumi Sant . Al-ways in trouble in primary and sec-ondary schools.Anti-Neopuritanist. Candidate for degrees in nearly a dozen fields before he managed to graduate in System Patterns."

"You know a lot about me," he said, grimly.

"I took the trouble to find out, af-ter that evening down in the party rooms," she said. "The trouble with you, Charles Roumi Sant , is that you think your own talents are real; but mine have to be some kind of fake, or part of some con game."

"No—" Chaz began and then his conscience tripped him up before he got any farther. Once more he had to admit that she was right.

"This is the twenty-first century," he said instead. "Everybody knows there's no such thing as the super-natural, or supernatural powers."

"Paranormal, I said. Not super-natural!" she retorted. "Just like you, and yours. There's that prejudice I was talking about. Because someone like me uses the old word 'witch' you think she's a charlatan. Well, I'm not. I was the one who saved you from that train wreck, whether you know it or not!" Her words seemed to trigger off something like a soundless explosion in his head.

"No, you didn't!" he said. "I saved myself. I did any saving that was done!" The wolverine snarled lightly un-der his knees; but the warning was not needed.As soon as the words were out of his mouth, he had felt the backwash of his own sudden fury and been jarred by it. But not jarred to the point of taking hack what he had just said.

"All right," he went on in a more level voice. "I'm not going to fly off the handle. But don't fool yourself. I got myself out of that train wreck sit-uation by using chain-perception: and I know how I did it, every step of the way. I used—" he broke off, on the point of talking about the catalyst."Never mind. You were go-ing to tell me what witches were really like. How did someone like you end up as one?"

"I didn't end up!" she said. "I was born one. Just as you were born the way you are. My mother and grand-mother were witches, and thought of themselves as witches. Only, by the time I came along, psychology knew enough about the phenomenon so that I could separate the super-stitions about us from the reality. Of course, I knew all about the superstitions. I heard enough about them from the older people. In fact, when I was a little girl, I believed them, too: until I learned better in school and university."

"All right," Chaz said again. Emo-tion had been strong in her voice; and that had gotten through to him more deeply than the actual words she had been saying. "Most of the old ideas about witches are super-stition. What's real, then?"

"The basis," she said. "We ac-tually can do things. But we have to be emotionally convinced we can do them before our paranormal abilities will work. In fact, that's a sort of ba-sic law for all people with such abili-ties. Stop and think for a minute. Do you think you could use this chain-perception of yours if you suddenly started doubting you could?"

" Hm-m-m.No," said Char, sud-denly reminded of what Waka had said about most candidates for work on the Pritcher Mass being self-con-vinced about their abilities.

"Of course not."Eileen went on. "It's like anything above the normal.The creative frenzy of an artist. The way an athlete surpasses himself un-der pressure, it takes a complete, whole-hearted commitment to the idea that you can do what you want to do."

She went on talking; but Chaz ' at-tention slipped slightly from what she was saying. He had just become aware that the vibration of the belt beneath them had gradually in-creased, and the air coming through the crack in the carton was now a breeze moving fast enough to cause a whistle. Holding up a hand to in-terrupt Eileen, he leaned over to put his eye to the crack and look outside. What he saw were concrete walls now flickering past rapidly. The belt had increased its speed several times over. Just how fast they were going now, he had no way to estimate; but it was certainly enough that any at-tempt to get off the belt on to the narrow service walkway running along one of its sides would mean se-rious injury or even death. He brought his head back and looked at Eileen in the glare of the limpet light.

"Where are we?" he asked,

"Getting close to Central Dis-tributing," she said."Almost to the place where we get off."

"Get off?"

"You'll see," she said. He thought, but could not be sure, that he caught the gleam of a secret satisfaction in her eyes at seeing him sweat out the descent from the belt, without know-ing how it was to be done. He clamped his own jaws shut; and for the next few minutes, neither of them said anything. Abruptly, she and Tillicum moved together, spreading the carton wide open, so that they sat exposed on the belt. Eileen rose from a sitting posi-tion into a crouch.

"Get ready," she said. "There'll be an overflow belt swinging in along-side this one in a few seconds. When it's parallel, get ready to jump."

"At this speed?"Char said. But she did not answer. He got into a crouching position himself; and a moment or two later saw a dark spot on the right side of the tunnel up ahead, which grew rapidly to reveal itself as the mouth of a connecting tunnel, A belt ran through this, too, curving in as Eileen had said, to paralell the one they were on. But it was several feet below the surface of their present carrier.

"Ready . . ." said Eileen. They flashed toward the point where the two belts ran side by side."Now!" Chazjumped, a little behind Ei-leen. Behind him, out of the corner of his eye, he could see Tillicum fly-ing through the air as gracefully as a cat. Then they hit.

He had braced himself against the landing. But it was like coming down onto a barely-filled waterbed. There was none of the impact Chaz had ex-pected; and no tendency whatever for the momentum they carried from the former belt to send them sliding or rolling.

It was then he realized that this second belt was also moving. Natu-rally, he thought, disgusted at his own lack of imagination, the speeds of the two belts had been matched—or almost—at the point where they changed over. They could possibly even have stood up to make the transfer . . . No, on second thought standing up might not have been so wise. Because, Char realized even as he was thinking this, the second belt was decelerating sharply. It had curved away from the main belt into a further tunnel; and now he saw the end of that tunnel, ex-panded into a fair-sized room half-filled with sorting tables leading to smaller belts disappearing off into further tunnel ports.

"This is a secondary sorting cen-ter—for when the main belt gets overloaded," Eileen was saying; and then they reached the end of the belt where it turned down abruptly to disappear into a slot in the floor. It tumbled them gently onto the floor at a good deal less than slow walking speed.

"A variable-speed belt," said Chaz , marveling, picking himself up. "How do they do that—" He broke off, having glanced back along the belt and seen how they did that.Every five meters or so they had been passed on from one belt to an-other, each traveling at a slightly slower speed.

"However," Eileen was saying, now back on her feet also, "in sum-mer, like this, it never gets over-loaded. After holidays, when a lot of people come back to their apart-ments at once, is the only time you can be sure to find it working. So it's pretty safe here right now."

"I'm supposed to hole up here?" Chaz asked, looking around him. "No," said Eileen. "Come along." She led the way, Tillicum beside her, past the sorting tables toward two doors, one marked Men and one Women . She beckoned Chaz to fol-low and led him through the door marked Women. The first room was a carpeted lounge. Within, along one wall was a long mirror, coming to within two feet of the floor and an equal distance from the three-meter-high ceiling. Eileen touched the two bottom corners of the mirror lightly with the tip of her index finger, stood back and clapped her hands, once. The mirror pivoted about its mid-point, one end retreating into the wall, the other swinging out into the lounge to reveal a hidden room, about the size of the lounge. Eileen stepped over the low ledge of wall into this room. Tillicum followed with an easy leap, and Chaz stepped over after the wolverine.

"Stand clear," said Eileen. Chaz moved aside and she touched the mirror. It swung back into place, shutting them in without visible exits.

Chazlooked around. There was a dais at one end of the room, with an elaborate, high-backed chair of what looked like carved wood upon it. Folding chairs were scattered about the gray concrete floor, apart from the dais.

"I thought you said you weren't a Satanist," he said to Eileen. "Isn't this one of their secret temples?"

"No, it isn't," she said. "As a matter of fact, it's a witches' hole. But I don't expect you to know the difference."

His conscience bit him--hard.

"I'm sorry," he said. "I really do appreciate what you're trying to do for me. I'm not trying to needle you. It just comes out that way, some-times."

"I've noticed that," she retorted, then softened in her turn."All right. Never mind. We might as well sit down now. We have to wait for someone."

“Who?",he said. “Or should I ask?”

"Of course you should ask," she Aid. "It's someone we call the Gray Man."

"A warlock?"

"Not a warlock. A male witch!" she said. "A warlock's—well, never mind. Actually, the old distinctions don't matter. He's just another one of us with paranormal talents; but in his case, he stands in a position which links the witch-group to the non-witch-group."

Chazfrowned.

"I don't follow you," he said. "All right, then," Eileen answered. "He's our link with the criminal un-derworld, the Citadel—I know, I told you we didn't have anything to do with the Citadel!" she added swiftly. "We don't, we full witches. But the connection has always been there, and sometimes it comes in useful for us.Like now. The Citadel can hide you until you can qualify for the Pritcher Mass. I can't."

"What if this Gray Man doesn't go along with you?" Chaz asked, feeling for the rock in his pocket instinc-tively.

"He will," her eyes flashed. "He gives away half his strength by mak-ing himself a servant of non-witches. Any one of us full witches is stronger than he is. I can make him do any-thing I want."

"Anything?" said a voice that seemed to echo strangely about them, from no particular individual source. Chaz glanced in several di-rections before realizing that the or-nate chair on the dais was now occu-pied. The slim, wide-shouldered fig-ure sitting in it was dressed in a tight-fitting gray jumpsuit; but it also wore gray gloves and shoes, and its head and neck were completely cov-ered by an elastic gray mask that showed a bald, lashless , expressionless face of the sort that might be found on an old-fashioned department store dummy. The figure looked small; but the size of the chair might have contributed to that. In addition, Chaz found, there seemed to be some distortion in the air about the gray figure, so that it was hard to keep it in focus for more than a few seconds without blinking.

"Anything I really want and need!" Eileen was answering, fiercely. "Are you challenging me?"

"Sister—dear sister—" said the voice that seemed to come from all around them as the lips of the mask stayed motionless, "let's not argue. Of course I'm happy to do what any one of youwant . What is it this time?"

"I want this man here kept safe from the law until he can qualify for work on the Pritcher Mass. He'll need to stay in theChicago area."

"Just that?Is that all, sister'?" The tone of the omnidirectional voice was ironic.

"That'll do for now," her voice was hard.

"It could be done. Of course," said the Gray Man. "I can do anything, let alone that. But should I?

You've never been kind to me like some of the others, sister."

"You know I don't have to be!" Eileen snapped. "I'm not one of the old ones whothinks she needs you. There's no covenant between us. So don't try to play one of your little games with me. You get paid by the Citadel for what we do for you when we feel like it. But you do what we say because you've got no choice."

"No choice?How sad."

"Stop wasting time!" said Eileen. "I've got to get back to my apart-ment. Have you got someplace in mind you can keep Mr. Sant , here, until he passes his Pritcher Mass test?"

"Oh yes," said the Gray Man. "I've got a lovely place. It's in a big building but he won't mind that. It's very quiet and very dark, but he won't mind that. In fact, after awhile he won't mind anything." Eileen stared at him for a long sec-ond.

"Have you gone completely in-sane?" she asked finally, in a low, cold voice. "Or are you actually chal-lenging me?"

"Challenging you? Oh no, sister," said the Gray Man, spreading his hands. "I've just got no choice. It's the Citadel that wants Mr. Sant out of the way; and he wasn't cooperative enough to stay nicely outside where the train wreck put him. Of course, his coming back in put him on the wrong side of the law and that makes it easier for us."

"Us?You class yourself all the way with criminals, now?" said Ei-leen. "Not that it matters. What's The Citadel got to do with him?"

"That, they don't tell me, sister. They only told me to bring him to them just as soon as you brought him to me. And so I must, now."

"Must? I've had enough of this!" Eileen said. "It's time you remem-bered who you're talking to. Tilli-cum—"

The wolverine moved—and froze again, as Eileen suddenly flung out her hand to stop him. A hand laser had appeared in one of the gray gloves of the Gray Man on the dais. Holding the weapon, the Gray Man threw back his head; and his laugh-ter beat upon them from all sides.

"Sister!Dear sister!" he said. "Do you think I'd risk anything like this unless I knew you were powerless?

Stop and think. Has anything worked for you lately? Has even the smallest work of the Great Art suc-ceeded for you?"

"What are you talking about?" said Eileen.

"You know. You know!" the Gray Man crowed like a delighted baby. "You're in love, sister dear. You've done what no witch can ever do, and get away with. You fell in love and so you've lost your power!"

"I told you I wasn't one of the old ones!" said Eileen, furiously. "I know what my powers are—natural paranormal talents. I can't lose them by falling in love, any more than I can lose an arm or a leg." Eileen glared at him.

"Of course you can't! Oh, of course!" crowed the Gray Man. "You can't lose them—but you can't use them. Because you believed the old tales when you were a child; and the primitive part of your mind can't get rid of that belief, can it? Of course love didn't take away your talents, sister dear. But it gave you a psychological block that keeps you from using them. Doesn't it annoy you, sister, to—" Eileen stepped back a step and threw up her hands, crossing the first two fingers of the left hand over the first two fingers of the right, before her face, so that she looked through the square these fingers made, at the Gray Man. She spoke swiftly:

"Light cursesdark, and dark cur-ses gray.

A tree, a rock, a shrieking jay,

Will hear you moan at break of day.

Pater sonris maleorum..."

"No use! No use!" shouted the Gray Man, rolling around in his seat in laughter. "Words, that's all you've got left now. Words! Now I'll take the man."

He pointed a forefinger of his free hand at Chaz ; and without warning sound and sight were cut off. Chaz found himself elsewhere.

V

His first thought was that the transfer had been immediate. But then the feeling followed that per-haps unconsciousness and some time had intervened between the last thing he remembered and this. This was nothingness. A dark, solid and endless, encompassed him. He seemed either fixed in it like the corpse of a fly in amber, or afloat in its infinite regions. He could feel nothing on his skin, not even warmth or coolness. He could not even be sure he breathed.

About him there was absolute si-lence—or was there? He became aware then of a slow, very slow, sound repeated regularly. He was baffled for a moment, and then he recognized it as the beating of his own heart. For the first time a suspi-cion woke in his mind. He made a deliberate effort to turn his head to the right, then to the left. There was no way for him to tell that his head had actually moved; but, as he made the effort, he heard a grating sound that seemed to come from behind him. He knew then what his situation was, even if his knowing was little help.

The grating sound was the noise of his neck vertebrae in movement. He must be hearing it by sound-con-duction through the bones of his spine and skull. So slight a sound could only be audible if he was in a total isolation chamber of some sort, possibly afloat in some liquid medium, restrained so that he could not feel the restraints; but held securely enough so that he could not free himself. The isolation chamber was an ancient sort of device, dating back into the twentieth century, but not therefore a harmless one. Enough hours in this situation with all sen-sory input cut off and he could lose his memory. Or his mind could be-come a blank page on which his cap-tors could impress any belief they wanted. He strained to reach out with both arms and legs, to touch something—anything. But he felt nothing. He could not even tell for sure if his arms and legs had obeyed him, except by the faint sound of creaking muscles that reached his ears. He stopped trying to touch his surround-ings and simply lay there. It was easiest just to lie still…

He caught himself drifting off into sleep and struggled back to aware-ness on the body adrenaline released by his own alarm. He did not dare sleep. Somehow he had to stay awake and find some way of giving dimension to his situation. If he only had some way of simply measuring time, he could use that as a mental anchor. He thought suddenly of his heartbeats and began to count them. One . . . two . . . three . .

. His nor-mal pulse, he knew, was around sixty-five beats per minute in a rest-ing state. Say that in this situation it was even slower, perhaps sixty a minute only. Sixty . ..sixty -one. . . . It was no use. He began to get the impression that he was no longer hanging motionless; but sliding off down some vast, lightless slope that went on to infinity. Faster he slid, and faster. He was rocketing through the darkness now, without feeling a thing, headed out toward the very end of the universe …

He was far off in space, sliding be-yond alt galaxies at some immeasur-able multiple of the speed of light, and accelerating still. He was being carried along by a current, a swift river of nothingness cutting through the stationary nothingness that was the rest of the infinite. He was alone ... no, he was not completely alone. Two bright spots were barely visible, far off on either side of the invisible rushing river that carried him forward so swiftly. The spots grew into shapes and came closer, shining with their own light in the darkness, until they placed him on either side of the river, traveling un-der their own power, but keeping level with him. They were two he had seen before. On his left was one of the massive snails he had dreamed about when he had been uncon-scious in his apartment, the other was the insectile , mantis-like alien to whom he had talked in the same dream.

"Help me," he said to the Mantis, now.

"Sorry," said the Mantis. "Ethics doesn't obligate us that far." He looked over at the Snail.

"Help me!" he said to the Snail. But the Snail neither answered nor showed any reaction, merely kept moving level with him.

"There's no point talking to him," said the Mantis. "When you talk to me, you talk to him, anyway. And when I talk to you, I tell you what he thinks, as well."

"Why won't one of you help me?" Chaz said, desperately. "All you have to do is pull me out of this river. Just pull me to the side a little and I can stop."

"True," said the Mantis. "But among other ethical laws, the one of hands-off forbids us to do that. You have to get a member of the union that unplugged you to plug you back in again. It's a breach of our own contract if we do it."

The two of them began to angle off from him, dwindling into the black ness.

"Wait!" Chaz called desperately. "What union is it that I have to get to plug me in again? Tell me the name of the union!"

"There isn't any!" floated back the tiny voice of the now-distant Mantis. "It hasn't been organized yet." They disappeared, like pinpoints of light gone out. Left alone, acceler-ating on the river of darkness, Chaz felt his consciousness dwindling as the snail and mantis had dwindled, shrinking down to a candle-point, to a spark, almost ready to go out.

If only he had his catalyst, he thought. If he could apply chain-per-ception to this situation maybe he could find a way out, even from this. If he had some alternatives to choose between . . . wait. He could still choose to turn his head, or not to turn his head. He could choose to move his arms or legs or not to move them. He could choose to move his right arm or his left . . .

That was no use, either. He needed the catalyst, if only for a few seconds. He tried to imagine the stony feel of it in his hand. Imagine, he told himself. Imagine it.

He concentrated. He could al-most feel the rock fitting into his grip. It was about the size of a small orange, he remembered. Its surface was rough. One small lump on its surface nestled almost com-fortably between the bases of his index and second finger when his hand was closed around the rock. The surface the little finger had rested on was almost planar.A graininess irritated the heel of his hand as he tightened his grip on it. It was just this heavy …

He could feel it.

He could feel it there in his right hand now, as real as it had ever felt in his grasp.

. . And he was no longer sliding down the endless river in darkness. He was back, afloat or whatever once more in the isolation chamber, as he had been when he first awoke.

The warm flood of a tremendous feeling of triumph washed through him. He had his catalyst. He could do anything now. He held it. He could feel it. Why shouldn't he be able to see it as well?

He lifted his right hand toward his face. There was no way of telling whether he actually held it before his eyes or not; but he felt more strongly every second that he did. It was there. If it was there, he could see it. He stared into the darkness.

Naturally, he told himself, he would not just suddenly see it, all at once. But perhaps gradually . . . he stared into blackness and thought he saw a faint pin-prick of light, such as the Snail and the Mantis had made when they had first appeared, and just before disappearing. He concen-trated on it, willing it to come nearer as they had come nearer. Slowly, painfully, it grew in brightness and size. It camecloser ... It came to him. He held the catalyst before his face and saw it plainly, every slant and angle and color in it. As he stared at it, it blurred and changed form.

He looked down a maze of alter-nate choices, like the edges of cards in a deck slightly spread out. Plainly, he read the message in them. Of course! Whoever had put him in this had not intended to leave him here forever; only until his sanity was suf-ficiently softened or dissolved. Someone would be coming to take him out, eventually. Until that time, he and the catalyst would find his mind some sanity-saving work to do.Of course. He almost chuckled to himself. In the infinity of darkness they could even create and build themselves a Pritcher Mass of their own, right here on Earth as it had been in his dream. They went to work ... and a Prit-cher Mass began to take form ... Like an explosion, light blared suddenly against Chaz ' closed eye-lids, and the nearly completed Prit-cher Mass was swept away, back into a corner of his mind. He lay limply with eyes still closed; and felt hands moving about him, heard the splash of liquid and the sound of buckles being unbuckled. There were faint pulls on his arms and legs.

"Right," a man's voice said dis-tantly. "Lift, now."

Chazfelt himself raised by hands gripping his shoulders and legs, moved through a small arc of dis-tance and laid on a surface which, after the isolation chamber and its lack of physical sensation, seemed shockingly hard. He kept his eyes closed. Hands moved about him, stripping some kind of helmet off his head and pulling off him tight-fit-ting, elastic clothing.

With the clothing off, warm air wrapped his whole body. After the silence of the chamber, every sound that was made seemed to roar in his ears. He heard the two that were working on him breathing like ele-phants. He heard the scrape of their feet on the floor as they turned and walked away from him, to begin sloshing and clanking noises back where he had been.

He opened his eyes and turned his head.

He lay on a white-sheeted bed in what appeared tohe a hospital room with a blue curtain drawn across its transparent front wall.Two men. both in white coats, were standing with their back to him, working on a black, rectangular box the size of two coffins placed one on top of the other. For a second the light dazzled Chaz ' eyes; and then his vision set-tled down.

He swung his legs over the side of the bed, stood up and took one step toward the two men. They did not hear him coming.

He hit one at the base of the skull with what Chaz thought was the catalyst rock—until he realized that his fist had been empty. Even with-out the rock it was a crushing blow with a sudden, almost berserk fury in Chaz powering it. The man he had hit went to his knees and fell over sideways. The other man began to turn with an astonished look on his face; and Chaz leaped on him, knocking him to the floor, beating away at him with fists and knees as he fell, in a silent frenzy of attack. It was a few seconds before Chaz realized that the second man was not moving either, before he could make himself stop. When he did stop and scrambled to his feet his fury ebbed, leaving him feeling sick and helpless. His stomach heaved, but there was nothing in it to come up. He clung gratefully to the side of the isolation chamber to keep from falling, as his trembling legs threatened to give way. The nausea and the trembling passed. The two on the floor still had not stirred. He could not bring him-self to look at either man's face. Luckily, the first one he had attacked lay face down. Without turning him over, Chaz managed to strip off the other's clothes, including the white coat, and put them on his own naked body. He turned to the curtain, pulled it aside and located the door of the hospital room. Opening the door a crack.hepeered out.

What he saw was an ordinary cir-cular hospital ward with two nurses inside the round desk-area that occu-pied the ward's center point. Both of them had their heads bent over some paperwork at the moment.Holding his breath. Chaz opened the door a little further, stepped through, closed it behind him, and walked casually toward the entrance to the ward a quarter of the way around the circle of rooms. Neither of the two nurses looked up. A second later he was in a wide corridor, busy with hospital person-nel and visitors alike. Three minutes later he was alone in a four-seaterPRT car leaving the basement of the hospital for the Central Terminal, courtesy of the credit card in a pocket of the man whose clothes he had taken.

As the car hurtled through the tun-nelways , Chaz glanced over the sta-tions listed on the car's directory and saw that he was in theChicago area, evidently up aroundEvanston .Chi-cago had been too big to seal as a single sterile unit; and to this day it was a number of connected domes and underground areas. It was this ramshackle character of the big city that had given him hope that he could manage to evade capture in it long enough to see Waka again and pass the test for work on the Pritcher Mass. Now, with someone else's credit card, his chances were even better.

Of course, the man from whom he had taken the clothes and the card might report the card stolen—al-though, if he was really a member of the Citadel, he might not want to tell the police how he had lost it.But even if the card was reported lost.Chicago was so large that by the time the Central Computer got po-lice sent to the last place he had used it, he could be miles away. In twenty-four hours, of course, all automated units of theChicago area could be programmed to refuse that particular card when it was sub-mitted to a computer outlet for credit or purchase. But in twenty-four hours he ought to be able to see Waka , pass the test, and get officially accepted for work on theMass. Once he was accepted, all Earth's policecould do would be to keep him un-der room arrest until time for him to ship out to theMass.

Things were looking up. Chaz re-laxed and even grinned a little to himself, remembering the astonished look on the face of the first man he had jumped, back in the hospital room. Plainly, the last thing they had expected was that their sensorially -deprived patient would have as much energy left in him as Chaz had shown.

But then he sobered. He might he free now, but in addition to the po-lice, the Citadel would be after him—and why should they have been in-terested in him in the first place? He had never had anything to do with the criminal element of the sterile world. He did not even know much, if anything, about it beyond what he, like everyone else, heard on the news or read in the magfax .

He tried to marshal what meager knowledge he had, so that he could get some idea of what he might be up against.But there was little even in the attic section of his mind to go on. In a cashless society, of course, the criminal element operated by markedly different tactics than they had in the bad old days when credit was expressed in pieces of paper you carried about and traded with other people. Now, credit was hardly more than a convenience. What really paid off was power.Power to control the credit ratings and the class of the cards that were computer-issued to you or your associates.Power to compel people to provide goods or services that could not ordinarily be bought, or which were out-and-out illegal.Power to tap the wide, un-sterile areas for things that might not be available within the limited space of the sterile ones.

Of course, it was that last reported power of the Citadel that led the strong belief that it, unlike any other element of society, had contacts out-side the sterile areas. Though who these contacts could he with, since anyone who stayed outside could hardly last more than a month or two before dying of Job's-berry rot, was a question. What could you of-fer a dying person to buy his or her services?Comforts?Drugs?

Luxu-ries?

Not being a Neopuritan , Chaz paid no attention to the legend that there were rare people outside who had survived the rot. That was non-sense. The rot was not a chemical or viral thing that sickened the body. Its effect was purely mechanical. The spores in the air sooner or later found their way into the lungs of anyone unshielded. There they sprouted and grew, until eventually the lungs were too choked to func-tion. Immunity did not enter into the situation; any more than the Neo-puritanic belief that the rot, and its parent the Job's-berry, were a judg-ment upon Man for his sins in pol-luting and despoiling the world.

No, there was no need to get scriptural about it. Planetwide pollu-tion had led to plant mutations; and plant mutations had led to the Job's-berry. The Job's-berry would lead to the end of the human race. There was nothing the remnant of human-ity existing in the shielded, sterile areas could do now to exterminate the plant and clean the world's air. All they could hope for was to fight a losing battle; long enough for the Pritcher Mass workers to find an-other habitable world, to which a se-lect handful of the race could emigrate, so that the race itself could survive and make a fresh start. Chazreined in his thoughts with a jerk. The little PRT car was almost to the Central Terminal destination he had punched at random when he got into the vehicle. He consulted the directory again and repunched for the location of Waka's office. The directory clicked, and showed the change in its destination window.

He sat back, his mind now off on another topic. What had happened to Eileen? She had seemed perfectly sure of herself up to the point where she had tried to use her witchcraft to discipline the Gray Man; and the Gray Man had laughed at her. What happened to a witch who lost her abilities? Chaz ransacked his mental attic without turning up any infor-mation on that point. For the first time he considered the possibility that she might be in the hands of the Citadel, just as he had been; and a cold hand seemed to take a firm grip on his stomach.

Of course, she had been helping him; and since it was this that had got her into trouble, if she was in trouble, it was not surprising to findhimself concerned about her. But aside from that, it was still surprising that, with the little time they had been together, she should have gotten so firmly caught in the gears of his emotions. He had always thought of himself as a loner with a cynical view of his fellow men and women; the last man in the world likely to find himself feeling undue affection for anyone on short notice. Unless . .

. they had somehow gotten to know each other unusually well that night of the condominium party. He wished he could remember more clearly what had gone on. In fact, once he had a moment, he should sit down and dig those memories out. Nothing in the mental attic could hide from him if he went after it de-terminedly enough.

The PRT car slid on through tun-nels and docked finally in the base-ment of the building in which Waka had his office, and possibly his living quarters as well. Chaz got out, more awkwardly and creakily than he had expected. His sudden explosion of activity after lying in that coffin-like isolation chamber for an unguess-able number of hours had appar-ently strained muscles. He felt as stiff as a football player the day after a game.

He walked up and down, swinging his arms in the privacy of the mo-mentarily empty PRT dock. The ex-ercise loosened him up and got his blood flowing again. He turned toward the elevator tubes; and then remembered that he was still wear-ing the white hospital jacket. He took it off and stuffed it into a re-cycle-tube slot at one end of the dock. This left him dressed in slacks and a short-sleeved white shirt. Not exactly a jumpsuit—but not odd enough to attract undue attention ei-ther. He took the tube up to Waka's of-fice: but found the door to it locked. He walked down the corridor of the floor he was on until he came to a rank of phones. Sticking his credit card into the slot of the first one he came to, he punched for Central Lo-cating and asked it to see if Mr. Al-exander Waka could be found and communicated with.

There was a small wait, while CL worked. Then a chime sounded from the phone grille and the screen lit up with a miniature image of Waka's head and bare shoulders.

"I'm at home." said Waka . "Is this an emergency? Oh—so it's you. Mr. Sant ."

"It's an emergency," Chaz said. "I need to be tested immediately."

"Immediately?" Wakalooked doubtful. "I don't think I can do that."

"Isn't it your duty to take any Pritcher Mass candidate at any hour?" Chaz said."Sorry, Mr. Waka . But it is an emergency.Emergency enough so that I'm ready to com-plain to the authorities, if I have to, to get a test right away. A complaint like that could cost an examiner his license." The examiner smiled.A small, hard smile.

"You might be interested to know, Mr. Sant ," he said, "I've had a call from Police Central about you. Are you sure you're ready to contact the authorities yourself, just to complain about me?" Chazlooked back at him for a sec-ond.

"So much for that commitment to the Pritcher Mass you were telling me about last time I saw you," he said.

Wakastayed where he was, frown-ing.

"All right." he answered, abruptly. "Apartment4646B, the same tower you're in. Come on up." He cut contact and the screen went blank.

Chazpunched off the phone at his end. For a second he leaned against the phone stand in relief. It was all over but the test now; and the test should be no problem. It was true he no longer had the catalyst: but in the isolation chamber imagining that he held it worked just as well.

Still leaning against the phone, he half-closed his eyes and made an ef-fort to feel the rock once more in his hand. It was about the size of an or-ange. A little roughness on it fitted almost comfortably between his first twofingers ...

He stood there, making the effort to imagine it. Evidently, however, conceiving something like this was much easier inside an isolation chamber than outside one. Slowly it grew on him that now, just standing here, as he was, he did not seem to be able to convince himself that the catalyst was really with him. VI

He stayed where he was by the phones for a good ten minutes, working with his imagination in an attempt to visualize the catalyst in the real sense in which he had visualized it while he had been in the iso-lation chamber. But he could not convince himself that he was suc-ceeding—and, worse, he could not feel the confidence he had felt in the isolation chamber, or earlier at the train wreck, when the catalyst had been physically in his hand.

Still, he kept trying. He only gave up after he had been stared at sev-eral times by people going and com-ing from offices along the corridor: and he beganto fear that he was be-coming conspicuous. Wakawould not wait forever. Chaz headed toward the elevator tubes, still working to make his imagination build the feel of a rock in his hand, the confidence of a catalyst in his mind. Chazwas on the twelfth level of the building he was in. It was normal for offices to be on the lower levels, apartments on the upper. Anything over thirty stories was somewhat un-usual, butChicago went back to the days of tall buildings. He stepped aboard an up-floating disc and let it carry him skyward. At the forty-sixth level he got off and went down a much narrower hallway than the one he had left be-low, until he came to a doorway of imitation walnut, with the figures 4646B glowing on it. He knocked, and the door opened immediately—as if Waka had been standing wait-ing behind it. The examiner grunted, seeing Chaz ; and then, sticking his head out into the corridor, looked up and down swiftly. Dressed now in a blue sleeping robe, he was not the Waka whom Chaz was used to seeing dur-ing office hours. This man was harder of manner, and at the same time furtive. He pulled his head back in, beckoned Chaz curtly inside the apartment and closed the door.

Inside, the apartment was more luxurious than any Chaz had seen since his childhood. There was a kitchenette at one end of the room he entered and, at theroom's other end, was an open door which gave a glimpse of an unusual extra cham-ber, apparently furnished for noth-ing but sleeping.

"What took you so long?" Waka demanded. His phone chimed. "Wait here." He turned and went into the sleep-ing room, closing the door behind him. Chaz could hear him answering the phone from in there. The mur-mur of his voice was audible, but it was not possible to make out the words.

Chazwas left standing in the midst of the main room of the luxury apartment. It was the sort of place that would have made a fine large home for a couple with a pre-school child or two. For some reason, Ei-leen returned to his thoughts with a poignancy he could hardly bear. She had deserved better than what he had brought her. Somewhere, there could be no doubt about it, she was in trouble—whether in the hands of the Citadel or the police.

The worst part was there was nothing he could do to help her. At least—nothing he could do unless he could pass the Pritcher Mass test now and end his own need to keep running. It all depended on his pass-ing that test. Once more he made the effort to imagine the feel of the catalyst in his fist. It would not come. Anger twisted itself up, like a tight, hard knot within him. There was no good rea-son he should not he able to evoke the catalyst. For that matter, he ought to be able to pass the test even without it. Either he had the talent to pass, or not; and he knew he had it. Letting anything get in the way was as ridiculous as Eileen letting some childish superstition get in the way of her talents when she had tried to control the Gray Man. What was it the Gray Man had accused her of having—a psychological block? That was nothing more thanhis own trouble with the catalyst in different form. The catalyst was a psychologi-cal prop—an emotional prop, for that matter—in his case.

The thought of the catalyst as nothing more than a prop brought a sense of relief to him. It was as if, somewhere inside him, a barrier had gone down. But before he had time to examine the feeling of relief, Waka came back.

"That was Communications Cen-tral, running what they said was a routine spot check," Waka said.

"When you called here, were you us-ing somebody else's credit card?"

"That's right," said Chaz .

"Get rid of it then, before they catch you with it on you. Will you?" Waka was not obviously sweating, but he passed a hand across his fore-head as if to wipe away perspiration. ''Do you realize records will show that particular card made a call to my number? If they connect the card with you, it'll he known you called me."

'What difference would that make?" Chaz asked, looking at the examiner closely. "It's natural I'd make one last try to get accepted for theMass. And, once accepted, the authorities can't do anything about it to me—or you."

"You don't understand," said Waka , shortly. He turned away to sit down at a small table—a real table, not one extruded from floor or wall. He opened a drawer and took out a pair of achromatic goggles and a tube of mixed colors. "Sit down. Just get rid of it, I tell you." Chazseated himself.

"Who are you worried about, ex-cept the authorities?" he asked. He looked thoughtfully at Waka . "You don't happen to have anything to do with the Citadel, yourself?"

"Put on the glasses," said Waka , shoving them across the tabletop. "What color do you want to try to separate from the rest?"

"Wait a minute." Chaz let the glasses lie. "The only people you could be worried about would have to be from the Citadel. But if you be-long to them, why are you giving me this test? From what I've seen so far, for some reason the last place the Citadel wants me is on theMass. How is it you're giving me a chance to go there?"

"Because I'm a goddam fool!" burst out Waka ."Stop asking ques-tions! Put on the glasses." Chazpicked them up, but he did not immediately put them on.

"Tell me something else first," he said, 'just one morething ; and then I'll put them on and we can get into the test. Did you ever know anybody you thought ought to qualify for work on the Mass, but who didn't seem to be able to pass the test be-cause of some psychological block?"

"Yes, yes—of course! I told you they were always self-convinced if they did it! Now, if you don't start taking this test right away, I'm not going to give it to you. Choose a color."

"Right," said Chaz .

He spoke absentmindedly. A strange thing was happening inside him. it was as if his inner world of personal knowledge was being turned upside down so that what had been west was now east and north had become south. If Waka was tell-ing the truth, and his own inner feelings were correct, then a catalyst had never been necessary to anyone. How had the idea of such a thing gotten started, then? And yet, though it did not jar him to give up the idea of the catalyst, his conviction about the figure of the crystal growing in the nutrient solution was stronger than ever,

Suddenly, he felt perfectly sure and certain inside about his ability to pass the test, with or without a catalyst. He put the glasses on: and everything in the room around him went gray.

"Choose." said Waka .

Chazlooked and saw the rice grains spread out on the tabletop be-fore him.

"Red." he answered.

He stared at the grains. They were all one identical color: but when he looked for those that might be col-ored red they appeared to stand out to his eye as if they had been indi-vidually equipped with flags. Some-thing shouted "red" at him although his eye refused to see any color dif-ference whatsoever. This time he did not bother to take the grains one at a time and line them up so that later he would he able to tell where he had gone wrong. There was simply no way he could go wrong. He merely brushed away all grains of the wrong color and corralled those he was after in a small pile. Then he took off the glasses. He had not failed. The red-colored grains were all together in the pile he had made.

Wakasat back in his chair with a heavy sigh. All at once the tension he had shown earlier was drained out of him.

"Well, that's it, then," Waka said. "It's done now."

He reached over and pressed the buttons on his phone. There was a second's hesitation,then a single mu-sical note sounded briefly from the speaker.

" PritcherMass Central," said a voice."Recording your report.Ex-aminer Alexander Waka ."

"I've just examined and found qualified a volunteer for work on theMass. " Waka said. "His name is Charles Roumi Sant . Citizen Num-ber—" he looked at Chaz .raising his eyebrows.

"418657991B," Chaz supplied.

"41865799lB,"Waka repeated to the phone. "He'll want to leave for the Mass as soon as possible. Mean-while, he may need immunity from Earth's legal procedure."

The phone said nothing for a mo-ment. Then the voice at the other end spoke again.

"We check the name Charles Roumi Sant with the records earlier supplied us by you, on a volunteer tested five times previously without success. We have already signalled Police Central that this man is signed for work on the Mass and no inter-ference with his departure for the Mass must be permitted. Charles Roumi Sant may place himself directly under Mass protection at our Central Headquarters Chicago of-fice, or he may have free time for nine hours until 2000 hours this eve-ning; at which time he will report to the office, ready for departure to theMass. "

"He'll come immediately—"

"No I won't!" Chaz interrupted the examiner. He leaned over to the phone. "This is Charles Sant . I'll be there at 2000 hours."

"Bring no possessions," said the phone. "Nothing from Earth, even from the sterile areas, is allowed on theMass. "

The connection was broken from the other end. The phone speaker hummed on an open line.

"You're taking a chance," said Waka , punching the phone off.

"I need those nine hours," said Chaz , "to find someone."

"You won't," said Waka .

"I won't?" Chaz leaned forward above the table. "What do you know about it?" Waka'sface twisted unhappily. "Enough," he said."Too much. Don't you know once you've gone to the Mass, you can never come back here? You'd have to forget her anyway. Forget her now and make it easier on both of you."

Chazreached across the table and took hold of the front of his sleeping robe.

"What do you know about Eileen? What do you know about all of this?" Wakadid not move.

"You're an amateur," he said al-most contemptuously to Chaz . "Do you think you can scare me? I've been scared by professionals." Chaz let go of the robe.

"All right," he said grimly. "I think I can put most of it together. You're tied up with the Citadel, too. So you know about what happened to Eileen and me. You know where she is now."

"Not now. I swear I don't," said Waka .

"You're tied up with the Citadel. But the Citadel doesn't want me to go to the Mass; and, you've just passed me so that I can go. If you're willing to go against the wishes of the Citadel to pass me, why won't you help me find Eileen?"

Wakaslumped in his chair.

"I told you I was a fool," he said heavily. "But there's a limit to how much a fool any man can be. Now, get out of here."

"No," said Chaz , thoughtfully. "No. Maybe I'll stay here the whole nine hours."

"Get out!" Waka shot to his feet."Now!"

"All right," Chaz said, without moving. "If you answer a few ques-tions for me, I'll go.Otherwise, not."

"It'll mean the end for you, as well as me, if you're found here by the wrong people," said Waka , a little hoarsely. "Doesn't that matter to you?"

"I'll risk it," said Chaz . "Want to talk?"

Wakasat down again, heavily.

"Oh, damn it, damn it, damn it!" he said helplessly. "What am I going to do?"

"Talk," said Chaz .

"All right." Wakastared at him. "I work for the Citadel as well as theMass. I passed your name on to the Citadel when you first came to be tested. They did some computer and other checking and came up with the opinion that you on the Mass would be bad medicine for them—don't ask me why, or how. And that's all I know."

"Not quite. What about Eileen?" "They said they were going to put someone on you," Waka answered sullenly. "It was her, evidently."

"Put someone on me? What does that mean?"

"Someone . . ." Waka made a helpless gesture with his hand."Someone to find out all about you, to find a weak spot in you, some-thing that would make it easy for them to keep you off theMass. " He looked at Chaz still sullenly. "She's not witch-born for nothing. She must have taken you apart one night and found out what made you tick; so she could report back to the Citadel on it."

"Eileen?" The happenings the night of the party began to glimmer up vaguely into Chaz ' consciousness, like the shape of sunken objects dimly seen in deep water. "But she said she didn't have to do anything she didn't want to—and she helped me escape from them. Why help me escape, if she was working on me for the Citadel in the first place?" "You don't know?" Waka almost sneered. "She's a woman as well as a witch. She fell in love with you—don'task me why. A witch ought to know better."

"What do you know about witches?"

Wakaglared at him for a second,then slumped again.

"I'm one," he said, miserably. "What did you think?"

"You?"

A wild suspicion roared like a tor-nado suddenly into Chaz ' mind. He took two steps to where Waka sat, reached down and ripped open the blue sleeping robe. Underneath was a padded or inflated device, which fitted around the man's waist to make him look thirty pounds heavier than the rest of his body now showed him to be.

"You're the Gray Man!" Chaz ex-ploded. "Answer me! You are the Gray Man, aren't you?" Wakadrew the robe hack around himself with a hiding motion, as if he would try to escape inside it.

"Leave me alone," he said in a husky whisper. "Get out of here, and just leave me alone!"

"Oh, no," said Chaz , grimly. "If you're the Gray Man, you really do know where Eileen is—" Wakabegan to laugh bitterly.

"Know? Me?" he said. "Do you think I'm that important to the Cita-del? You saw how that witch of yours was ready to push me around and bully me. I'm a go-between, that's all. I tell the coven what the Citadel wants from them; and the witches in the coven tell me how much they'll do. I'm—do you know what I am?"

Tears brimmed unexpectedly in Waka's eyes and slid down his cheeks.

"I'm a slave!" he said, hoarsely. "I've got paranormal talents just like you; but not the kind that makes me able to stand up to anybody. The Citadel owns me— owns me!"

He caught himself, shook his head abruptly, swallowed and sat up. When he spoke again, his voice was stronger.

"No," he said. "Cancel that. Not quite. They don't quite own me. Part of me belongs to the Pritcher Mass—and that part's free of them. Some-day the Mass is going to find a new, clean world for people; and when it does, it's the ordinary people who'll be left behind and the talented ones who'll escape. Someday there'll be no Citadel to make a slave out of anyone like me!" He got to his feet. Curiously, he seemed to have refound some of the stature and dignity Chaz had seen in him on the day in his office when he had told Chaz of his commitment to theMass.

"Now," he said, calmly, "if you've got any sense at all, you'll clear out of here. The Citadel will be sending someone around to check up on me; as soon as they get the record of your call to me, with that credit card you're carrying. By this time they know that card's being used and it means you're using it. So, if you use your head, you'll go right to the Prit-cher Mass Chicago office. But in any case, stay clear of me. Because when they come I'll have to tell them you're looking for Eileen Mortvain ; and then they'll know where to look for you."

"You're sure you don't know where she is?" Chaz demanded. Waka shook his head.

"I wouldn't tell you if I did," he said. "But I really don't. They took her right after they took you. I've no idea where."

Chazturned and went out the door. As it closed behind him, he heard Waka's phone chime with an-other call.

On the odd chance that that call was from someone involved with the Citadel, he wasted no time. Half an hour later saw him once more on a train fromChicago to the Wisconsin Dells, the passage paid for by the credit card from the hospital atten-dant, which he still carried.

He arrived at the Dells with seven and a half hours left of his available time before reporting to the Mass Chicago office. He took a PRT car to his own condominium. Happily, the dock in the condominium basement was empty of travelers, any one of which might have been a resident who could recognize him. He took the elevator tube.

His attic memory had preserved the number of Eileen's apartment, following that one visit he had made with her to pick up the wolverine. But when he came to the doorway he remembered, the door itself was standing wide open in locked posi-tion as was customary with tenant-less apartments; and all the furniture had been retracted into the floor or the walls, so that the automated hall-cleaning equipment could do main-tenance here until a new tenant took over.

He stared into the empty apart-ment for a moment. Then he left it and went down the hall to the phone stand and called the building directory.

"Do you have a forwarding ad-dress for Ms. Eileen Mortvain ,apartment1433 ?" he asked.

"I'm sorry," the computerized voice of the directory fluted from the speaker. "No Eileen Mortvain has been listed among the tenants in this building during the past year."

"Check for error, please," said Chaz . "I happen to know she was oc-cupyingapartment1433 just a day or two ago, at most."

There was a very slight pause.

"Checked for error.None, sir.No Eileen Mortvain listed in this build-ing during the past year. Previous oc-cupant of 1433 was male and de-parted apartment eighteen days ago." There was no point in arguing with a machine.

"Thanks," said Chaz , automati-cally, and closed off the phone con-nection. He stood thinking for a moment. Then he reached for the phone again and punched the call number of an-other apartment in the building whose occupant he knew.

"Mrs. Doxiels ?" he said, when a female voice answered. "This is Chaz Sant ."

"Why, yes Chaz ." There was a slight pause before Mrs. Doxiels went on. "We were just wondering if you'd been hurt more than you thought in that train wreck. No one's seen you since—"

"No, I'm fine," he interrupted. "I've just been unusually busy. I wanted to ask you something, though. You know Eileen Mortvain ?"

"Eileen Mortvain ?"

"1433," Chaz said, harshly. "She came to at least one of your con-dominium parties in the amusement rooms. You must know her. Well she's moved, it seems; and I was wondering if you knew where, or when sheleft? "

There was a peculiar pause for second at the far end; then Mrs Doxiel's voice answered on an entirely different note.

"Oh yes, dear!" she said. "I'm so sorry; but Eileen didn't want anyone to know she was here. We've been taking care of her in our little place. She's here now, and when she heard me say your name she started waving at me. You're to come right away.'

Chazsighed with relief.

"I'll be right down," he said.

"We'll be waiting—but, Chaz dear!" cried Mrs. Doxiel'svoice over the phone, "if you run into anyone, don't say where you're going!"

"I won't," he said, and broke the connection.

He was turning from the phone rank when a strange noise sounded before him. It was like a low-pitched animal whine, half-chewed into words. He heard it clearly, but it was a second before it translated in his head into understandable speech.

" Lie," it said. " Lie. Not go."

He turned. What he saw, crouched next to the wall into such a small shape that he had to look twice to be sure it was actually there in the soft lighting of the hallway, was a wolverine.

"Tillicum?" he said, hardly able to believe that it was Eileen's pet or fa-miliar he was seeing.

" Don't go," the wolverine's whin-ing was twisted into a mewing sort of speech." Eileen not there.Woman lies ."

"Where then?Where is Eileen?" Chaz lowered his own voice to a whisper just in time, as a door far-ther down the hall opened and a man came out. However, the man turned away from them, going off toward the elevator tubes.

" Other place. Sent me—watch for Chaz . Chaz mustn't try find. Must goMass. Message—goMass, Chaz."

Chazfelt his eyes start to burn as he stared down at the strangely hard--to-see animal.

"Why should I believe you?" he muttered. "I can't trust anyone else."

" Save Eileen,"mewed the wol-verine. " Save Eileen by going Mass. No other way. Go now. Or alldie—Ei-leen, Chaz , Tillicum , all."

"No," said Chaz , softly but fiercely. "No, I don't think I will. Show me where she is and I'll go."

" Can't show."Tillicum seemed to shrink even smaller." Out of talk now. Last message. Rememberspell—think Eileen name but once you are there. On Mass, think Eileen name. Now ... gone ..." And, unbelievably, Tillicum was in fact gone. Chaz blinked at the spot by the wall where the wolverine had been. For just a moment his sight had blurred; and when it cleared again, the spot was empty. In his head, out of his attic memory, Eileen's voice sang again, as he had heard it in his apartment.

" Gaestthou down tae Chicago, sae fair.

Harp at ye, carp at ye, water and wine.

. . . Think'st thou my name but once thou art there,

So shalt thou be a true love o'mine . ."

He had indeed thought her name inChicago , after he had escaped from the hospital; and now—he faced it finally—he was a true love of hers. Or perhaps he had been in love with her even before that, following that unclear evening in the party rooms. At any rate he cared for her now, as he had never cared for any-one else, and if he had to believe anyone, he would choose to believe her wolverine and its message. He turned and left the con-dominium; and returned safely toChicago , to the Pritcher Mass office there. Ten and a half hours later, he was being lifted into orbit by a ram-jet, to rendezvous with an inter-planetary ship bound for the Mass with supplies. He was spaceborn af-ter that for twenty days of one-grav-ity thrust and retro-thrust. At the end of that time and four billion miles from Earth, he was delivered, naked as a newborn babe and still damp from the decontamination shower he had been through, into a passage-tunnel leading from the ship to the entrance of the massive metal plat-form beyond Pluto on which the Pritcher Mass was being built. A tall, slim, dark man in blue coveralls met him and led him to the heavy airlock doors of the entrance itself, now open on the interior darkness of the Mass platform. He was about to pro-ceed into that darkness, when the tall man checked him with a hand on his arm.

"Your last chance," the tall man said. "Stop and think. You can still turn around now, get back on the ship and ride home to Earth."

Chazlooked at him.

"I wouldn't turn back now, even if I wanted to," he answered.

The tall man smiled.

"They all say something like that," he said. "Take notice of the warning, then. You know the line from Dante'sInferno, that was supposed to be writ-ten over the entrance to Hell?

"`. . .Ye who enter here.' Canto theThird, isn't it?" said Chaz , delv-ing into the attic to find the line. "Yes, I know it. Why?"

"We've paraphrased it for our own use," said the tall man."A very im-portant warning for newcomers. Look."

He pointed over the airlock en-trance; and Chaz now noticed that there were letters incised in the metal above it. He moved closer un-til he could read them.

"ALL EARTH ABANDON.YOU WHO JOIN US HERE."

VII

Chazstared at the words,then turned to the slim man.

"What does it mean?" he asked.

"That's something it'll take you a few months here to fully under-stand," said the other. "You'll be getting a brief version of the answer in a few minutes. Come inside now."

He led Chaz through the doorway. The heavy outer lock door slid to be-hind them with a shivering crash of metal; and lights flashed on to show

Chazthat they stood in the lock, itself a space at least the size of Waka's apartment with the two rooms of it thrown into one.A sudden tug of nearly one G on his body surprised him; and then he remembered that the Mass had space to spare—even enough to provide a room for the generators necessary to generate a continuous gravity field. Airsuits hung on a rack along one wall to Chaz ' left. Along the wall to his right was another rack, holding blue cov-eralls. Between both walls, at the far end, was the inner lock door, which was now beginning to open.

"Get dressed," said the slim man, waving at the rack of coveralls. Chaz obeyed, and when he finished found the other ready with a hand out-stretched to him. "By the way, I'm Jai Losser , the Assistant Director on the Mass. Sorry, but our rule is we don't even give our names outside that door." Chazshook hands.

"Charles Roumi Sant ," he said.

"Oh, I know your name," Jai laughed. He had a pleasant laugh and his thin face lit up with the good humor of it. "We've got a heavy dos-sier on you, phoned over from the supply ship with other mail and in-formation when she was docking. I'm going to take you now to meet the Director, Lebdell Marti. He'll give you your initial briefing. Know where you are right now, on the Mass?"

"I've seen diagrams," answered Chaz .

In fact, those diagrams had been in his mind more than once on the twenty-day trip here. They had shown the Pritcher Mass as a unit made up of three parts. One part was an asteroid-like chunk of granitic rock about twelve-by-eight miles, roughly the shape of an egg with one bulging end. Covering half of the surface of this rock was a huge steel deck, some fourteen stories thick. From the upper surface of this deck rose what looked like an ill-assorted forest of antennae; steel masts of heights varying from a hundred me-ters to over a kilometer. Between the masts, steel cables were looped at in-tervals; and small power lifts or cable cars moved Mass workers up the masts or across the cables. Surrounding and extending be-yond the masts and cables was some-thing that did not show to the human eye or to any physical instruments—the Mass itself. In the diagrams Chaz had seen, the illustrators had ren-dered it transparently in the shape of an enormous shadowy construction crane—although no one was sup-posed to take this as a serious rendering of its actual form, any more than anyone could seriously imagine a physical crane that could swing its shovel across light-years of distance to touch the surface of a distant planet.

"Thirdlevel, west end, aren't we?" Chaz asked. "West" was, of course, a convenience term. For purposes of direction on the Mass itself, one end of the platform had been arbitrarily labeled "west," the other "east." "Up" would be in the direction of the deck surface overhead.

"That's right," said Jai. He had a soft bass voice. "And we go in to Centerpoint to the Director's office." He led the way out of the lock into a somewhat larger room, half-filled with forklift trucks and other ma-chinery for transferring cargo. Some of these were already trundling toward the lock on automatic as the two men left it.

"It'll take thirty hours or so to get all the supplies off, and the ship ready to leave again," said Jai, as they went through swinging metal doors at the far end of the machinery room, into a wide corridor with a double moving belt walkway both going and coming along its floor. Jai led the way onto the belt and it car-ried them off down the brightly lighted, metal-walled corridor. "This is our storage area.First level."

"Living and work levels are above us?" Chaz said, as they passed an open doorway and he looked in to see a warehouse-like space stacked with large cartons on pallets.

"Levels four to six and eight to fourteen are quarters and work areas," answered Jai. "Seventh level is all office—administrative. Origi-nally, living quarters for the administrative people—the nontalented -was to be on seven, too; but it was felt after a while that this made for an emotional division among the people here. So now the adminis-trators have apartments with the rest of us."

"Us?" Chazlooked sideways at the other man. "I thought you said you were the Assistant Director?"

"I am," Jai said. "But I'm also a worker on theMass. The workers have to be represented among the administrative staff, too. Leb , the Di-rector, is a nonworker ." He smiled a little at Chaz . "We tend to talk about people here as divided into workers and nonworkers , rather than talented and nontalented . It is a little more courteous to those who don't have the ability to work on theMass. " Chaznodded. There was a curious emotional stirring inside him. He had thought about working on the Mass for so long that he had be-lieved he took it for granted. He had not expected to find himself unusu-ally excited simply by actually being here. But he found he was; in fact, remarkably so. And it was hard to believe that this geared-up sensation in him was only self-excitement.

"I feel hyped-up," he said to Jai, on impulse. He did not usually talk about himself; but Jai had an aura about him that encouraged friend-ship and confidences."Funny feel-ing—like being too close to a static generator and having my hair stand on end. Only it's my nerves, not my hair, that's standing up straight and quivering."

Jai nodded, soberly.

"You'll get used to it," he said. "That's one reason we know the Mass is there, even if we can't see it, touch it, or measure it—that feeling you mention. Even the nonworkers feel it.In spite of the fact that they aren't sensitive to anything else about it."

"You mean people with no talent can feel the Mass, up there?" Chaz glanced ceilingward . "That's sort of a contradiction in terms, isn't it?"

Jai shrugged again.

"Nobody can explain it," he said. "But then, just about everything we're doing here is done on blind faith, anyway. We try something and it works. Did you ever stop to think that the Mass we're building here may be a piece of psychic machinery that was never intended to do the thing we're building it for?"

"You mean it might not work?"

"I mean," said Jai, "it might work, but only as a side issue. As if we were building an aircraft so that we could plow a field by taxiing up and down with a plow blade dragged be-hind our tail section. Remember, no one really knows what the Mass is. All we have is Jim Pritcher's theory that it's a means of surveying distant worlds, and Pritcher died before work out here was even started."

"I know," said Chaz . He glanced appraisingly at the Assistant Direc-tor. What Jai had just been talking about was a strange sort of idea to throw at a newcomer who had just arrived for work on theMass. Unless the other had been fishing for some unusual, unguarded response from Chaz . They went on down the corridor and took an elevator tube upward to the seventh level. Getting off at the seventh level, they went east a short distance down another corridor and turned in through an opaque door into a small outer office where a tiny, but startlingly beautiful, black-haired girl, looking like a marble and ebony figurine, sat at a communications board talking with someone who seemed to be the cargo officer aboard the supply ship Chaz had just left.

". . .thirty-five hundred units, K74941," she was saying as they came in. She looked up and gave them a wave before going back to her board. "Check. To Bay M,pallet A 4—go right in Jai. He's waiting for you both—nineteen hundred units J44, sleeved. To Bay 3, pallets N3 and N4 . . ." Jai led Chaz on past her through another door. They came into a somewhat larger room, brown-car-peted, dominated by a large desk complex of communicating and computer reference equipment. Seated in the midst of the complex was a large, middle-aged, gray-skinned man full of brisk and ner-vous movements.

"Oh, Jai—Mr. Sant .Come in—pull up some chairs." Lebdell Marti had a hard baritone voice, with a faint French accent. "Be with you in a moment . . . Ethrya ?"

He had spoken into the grille of his communicating equipment. The voice of the living figurine in the outer office answered.

"Yes, Leb ?"

"Give me about ten or fifteen minutes of noninterruption ? No more, though, or I'll never get caught up."

"Right.I'll call you in fifteen min-utes, then."

"Thanks." Lebdell Marti sat back in his chair, the spring back creaking briefly as it gave to his weight. Then he got to his feet and offered his hand to Chaz , who shook it. "Wel-come." They all sat down, and Marti rum-maged among his equipment to come up with a thick stack of yellow message sheets.

"Your dossier," he said, holding the stack up briefly for Chaz to see,then dropping it back down on the desk surface of his complex. "No great surprises in it, as far as I can see. All our workers on the Mass are strong individualists, and I see you're no exception. How do you feel about being here at last?"

"Good," said Chaz .

Marti nodded.

"That's the answer we expect," he said. His chair creaked again as he settled back. "Jai pointed out to you the message over the air lock on the way in? Good.Because we take those words very seriously here, for a number of reasons. You'll be learn-ing more about that as you get set-tled in here; but basically it adds up to the fact that work with a psychic piece of machinery like the Mass re-quires an essentially artistic sort of commitment. The Mass has to be ev-erything to each one of us.Every-thing. And that means any com-mitment to Earth has got to be pushed out of our heads completely. Now . . . how much do you know about the Mass?"

"I've read what's in the libraries back on Earth about it."

"Yes," Marti said. "Well, there's a sort of standard briefing that I give to every new worker who joins us here. Most of it you've probably read or heard already; but we like to make sure that any misconceptions on the part of our incoming people are cleared up at the start. Just what do you know already?"

"The Mass was James Pritcher's idea," said Chaz , "according to what I learned—although it was just a the-oretical notion to him. As I under-stand it, he died without thinking anyone would ever actually try to build it."

Marti nodded. "Go on," he said.

"Well, that's all there is to it, isn't it?" Chaz said. " Pritcherwas a re-search psychologist studying in the paranormal and extrasensory fields. He postulated that while no paranormal talent was ever completely dependable, a number of people who had demonstrated abilities of that kind, working together, might be able to create a psychic con-struct—in essence, a piece of nonma-terial machinery. And possibly that kind of machinery could do what material machinery couldn't, be-cause of the physical limitations on material substances. For example, maybe we could build a piece of psy-chic machinery that could search out and actually contact the surfaces of worlds light-years from the solar sys-tem—which is exactly what the Mass is being built to do."

"Exactly," murmured Jai. Chaz glanced at the tall man, remember-ing Jai's words about the Mass possi-bly being something other than it was intended to be.

"That's right—or is it, exactly?" echoed Marti, behind the complex. "Because the truth is, Charles—"

" Chaz, I'm usually called," Chaz said.

" Chaz, when we get right down to it, we really don't know what we're building here.The Mass is nonmate-rial, but it's also something else. It's subjective. It's like a work of art, a piece of music, a painting, a novel—the abilities in our workers that create it are more responsive to their subconscious than to their conscious. We may be building here something that only seems to be what our con-scious minds desire: a means of dis-covering and reaching some new world our race can emigrate to. Ac-tually it may turn out to be some-thing entirely different that we de-sire—with a desire that's been buried in the deep back of our heads, all along."

"The Mass may not work, then, you mean?" Chaz said.

"That's right," said Marti. "It might not work. Or it might work wrong. We only know that we're building anything at all because of the feedback—the feel of the pres-ence of theMass. You've already sensed that, yourself?"

Chaznodded.

"So, maybe we're just in the posi-tion of a group of clever savages," Marti said, "fitting together parts of a machine we don't understand on a sort of jigsaw puzzle basis, a machine that may end up doing nothing, or blowing up in our faces. Of course, we've come a long way in the last fifty years. We realize nowadays that paranormal or psychic—whatever you want to call them—abilities do exist in certain people; even if they can't be measured, dealt with, or used according to any rules we know. But a lot of that distance we've come has also been downhill. For one thing—the most important thing—we managed to foul our nest back on Earth, until now it's un-livable. Not only that, but we went right on making it unlivable even back when there was still time to save it, in spite of the fact that we knew better. The people still on Earth may last another fifty, or an-other five hundred, years; but they're headed for extinction eventually by processes our great-grandparents in-stigated. In short, as we all know, hu-manity on Earth is under a death sentence. And a race under death sentence could have some pretty twisted, and powerful, subconscious drives in its individuals; even in indi-viduals with psychic talents building something like the Pritcher Mass."

Marti stopped speaking; and sat staring at Chaz . Chaz waited, and when the other still sat silent, spoke uphimself .

"You want me to say something to that?" he asked.

"I do," replied Marti.

"All right," said Chaz . "Even if what you say is true, I don't see how it matters a damn. The Mass is the only thing we've come up with. We're go-ing to build it anyway. So why worry about it? Since we've got no choice but to plug ahead and build it any-way, let's get on with that, and not worry about the details."

"All right," said Marti. "But what if the subconscious details in one worker's mind can mess us all up?

What if something like that keeps the Mass from coming out the way it should, or working when it's done?"

"Is there any real evidence that could happen?" Chaz asked.

"Some," said Marti, dryly. "We've had some odd reactions here and there among the workers themselves. You may run across some in yourself in the next minutes—or the next few months, so I won't describe them to you. The fact remains, as I kept try-ing to impress on you, that we really don't know what we're creating; and in any case we have no experience in this type of psychic creation. All we can do, as you say, iskeep on build-ing. But we can take one pre-caution." Chazlifted his eyebrows question-ingly.

"We can try to get the greatest possible concentration by our work-ers on the conscious aim we have for the Mass," Marti said. "That's why the legend was over the air lock when you came in. That's why I'm talking to you now about this. What-ever memories or associations you have in your mind about Earth, forget them. Now, put them out of your mind in every way you can. If they crop up unexpectedly, cut them down utterly and quickly. Concen-trate on the Mass, on this place here, on your co-workers and on the world we hope to find. Forget Earth and everyone on it. They're already dead as far as you're concerned. You may not be one of those who'llemigrate to the new world when we find it—in fact the odds are against any of us here being that lucky—but you're never going back to Earth again. We won't even send your body back, if you die. Keep that in mind, and meditate on it." Meditate . . . " Think'stthou my name, but once thou art there . . ." The ghost of a song-fragment sounded unbidden in the back of Chaz ' mind.Eileen ...

Marti was standing up and extend-ing his hand. Chaz rose and shook hands with the Director again.

"All right," said Marti. "Jai will get you started. Good luck."

"Thanks," said Chaz .

He followed Jai out the door. They passed through the outer office where Ethrya was still reciting num-bers and directions into her communications equipment. They left and took an elevator tube up.

"Want to see your quarters now?" Jai asked, as they floated upward on the elevator disk. "Or would you rather take a look at the Mass, first?"

"The Mass, of course—" Chaz stared at the slim man. "You mean I can go to it right away, like this?"

"That's right," Jai smiled. "For that matter, you could try to go to work right away, if you wanted to. But I'dadvise against it. It's better to have some experience of what it feels like up there on top, before you try doing anything about it."

"Go to work?" Chaz decided that the other man was serious. "How could I go to work? I don't even know what I'm supposed to do, much less how to do it."

"Well," said Jai, as the various levels slipped by outside the trans-parent tube of the elevator shaft, "those are things no one can help you with. You're going to have to work them out for yourself. You see, they're different for everyone who works on the Mass. Everyone has a different experience up there; and each person has to find out how to work with it in his own way. As Leb said, this is creative work, like paint-ing, composing or writing. No one can teach you how to do it."

"How do I learn, then?"

"You fumble around until you teach yourself, somehow." Jai shrugged. "You might just possibly learn how the minute you set foot on the deck. But if you're still trying three months from now that'll be closer to the average experience." "There must be something you can tell me," Chaz said. The unusual nervous excitement he had felt from the moment he had arrived was building inside him to new peaks, as their disk carried them closer and closer to the Mass itself.

Jai shook his head.

"You'll find out how it is, once you've discovered your own way of working with the Mass," he said.

"You'll know how you do it, then, but what you know won't be any-thing you can explain to anyone else. The best tip I can give you is not to push. Relax and let what happens, happen. You can't force yourself to learn, you know. You just have to go along with your own reactions and emotions until you find yourself tak-ing hold instinctively."

Their disk stopped. Above them the tube ended in ceiling. Jai led Chaz from it out into a very large room filled with construction equip-ment; and the two of them got into airsuits from a rack near a further elevator.

Suited, they took the further ele-vator up through the ceiling over-head. Their ride ended in a small windowless building with an air lock.

"Braceyourself ," said Jai to Chaz over the suit phones; and led the way out of the air lock. Chazwas unclear as to how he might have been supposed to brace himself, but it turned out that this did not matter. No matter how he might have tried to prepare himself for what he encountered on the out-side, airless deck, he realized later, it would not have helped.

He stepped into a great metal plain roofed with a dome of brilliant stars seemingly upheld by the faintly lighted, gleaming pillars of the metal masts. It was as he had seen it pic-tured in books. But the ghostly shape of a great construction crane was not superimposed on it. Instead, his imagination saw the elevator cages on the masts and the cars on the metal cables as part of his favorite image of seed crystals on threads im-mersed in a nutrient solution. For a moment, almost, he convinced him-self he saw the Mass itself, like a great, red ferrocyanide crystal, grow-ing in the midst of all this.

"This way," Jai's voice was saying in his earphones; and Jai's grip on his airsuited arm was leading him to the base of the nearest mast, into a metal elevator cage there barely big enough to hold them both at the same time.

They entered the cage. Jai's gloved hands touched a bank of controls, and the cage began to slide swiftly and silently up the mast. As the deck dropped away beneath them, the ex-citement in Chaz , the perception of an additional dimension, shot up toward unbearability . All at once it seemed they were out of sight of the deck, high among the stars and the masts, with the softly-lit silver cables looping between them; and without warning the whole impact of the Mass came crashing in upon Chaz at once. It poured over and through him like a tidal flood. Suddenly, the whole universe seemed to touch him at once; and he was swept away and drowning in a depthless sadness,a sadness so deep he would not have believed it was possible. It cascaded over him like the silent but deafen-ing music of some great, inconceiv-able orchestra, each note setting up a sympathetic vibration in every cell of his body. Consciousness began to leave him under the emotional assault. He was vaguely aware of slumping, of being caught by Jai and upheld as the other man reached out with one hand to slap the control panel of the cage. They reversed their motion, rocking back down the mast. But the silent orchestra pursued them, thun-dering all about and through Chaz , shredding his feelings with great, voiceless chords. An unbearable sadness for all of mankind overwhelmed him—agony for all its bright rise, its foolish errors that had lead to its present failure, and its stumbling, falling, plunging down now toward extinction

...

Sorrow racked him—for Earth, for his people, for everything he had known and loved. Eileen . . . Eileen Mortvain...

. . . And the great silent orchestra picked up the name, roaring into the melody that went with the words he was remembering: ". . . Think'st thou my name, but once thou art there . . ."

"Eileen," he muttered, upheld by Jai, "Eileen . . ."

" Chaz?"Out of the orchestra sound, out of the Mass, the unimag-inable dimension of the universe he had just discovered, and the sorrow and tragedy of the murdered Earth, he heard her voice calling.

". . . Chaz? Are you there? Can you hear me? Chaz . . .?"